By Anthony Dockrill

I was looking at the programming on a high-profile Sydney AM station this week when I was struck by how little the world has changed. Their website showed photos for 22 presenters for its shows. Only one was a woman. Less than 5%. Now I know there will be other women on air reading the news etc. But when it comes to putting their talent forward, it’s 95% men, 5% women. That’s a gender mix on par with The Shawshank Redemption.

A quick look around the AM dial shows that while some stations such as 2UE and ABC Radio Sydney have a decent gender mix – although Chris Bath moving on hurts their figures somewhat – overall AM radio in general resembles the BBQ outside of Bunnings.

A look at FM gives a slightly rosier picture, but it’s still impossible to look at radio and not see it as a giant boys’ club.

OK, most female readers and possibly the Editor of Radioinfo are collectively rolling their eyes at this revelation.

Why I’m writing about this is not just how ridiculous this level of sexism is in 2025, but also because I see this as a total dead end when it comes to programming. You have shut the door on 50% of the available talent and you are in turn saying to 50% of all listeners, and the ones who make many of the spending choices, that you are not a high priority. And you can see the end result of these kinds of backward-looking programming choices when you look at the podcasting landscape. It is much more diverse, equitable and vibrant and, importantly, it is growing.

I was the program director at a large Sydney community radio station and over time our audience started to lean male, and it was a trend we found hard to reverse. We did reverse it, but the first thing you have to do is acknowledge you have a problem. It would have been easy to concentrate on the top-line number as it was slowly trending up. To do so would be to ignore the elephant in the room. Once you acknowledge you have a problem, you can talk about how to fix it.

It’s now out of fashion to talk about quotas and positive discrimination, but turning around a bus means overcoming years or, in the case of AM radio, decades of inertia. It’s also, pretty clear to me that so called “merit” systems often result in tribal outcomes. Don’t believe me? Just turn on the radio or look at the opposition benches.

And it’s not just gender where radio has become adrift from modern Australia. Radio, and especially AM radio, is a white monoculture. If you think Australia is a successful multicultural society, don’t turn on the radio. It’s clear a large movement of modernisation needs to take place. Radio should reflect Australia and right now it simply doesn’t. This doesn’t have to be a negative or destructive change. Again, podcasting is a model that shows a way forward. The other model the commercial sector can learn from is the community radio sector.

It’s time radio acknowledged it has a problem and develops a path back into modern Australia.

I’ve written bullishly about the fortunes of radio this year, but when you look at the mix of who is on air, it is hard not to see radio as anything other than a legacy product. I don’t think this is radio’s future, in fact I’m sure it won’t be, but right now radio has some hard choices it needs to make. It needs to start seeing itself as a platform that will be here and vibrant 50 years from now and not a lemon to be squeezed for today.

Anthony Dockrill is a Digital Producer at Pod Jam and the former Program Director of 2SER FM Sydney.