Radio diversity stalls: Minority staffing plateaus as leadership gaps persist
By Keren Henderson, Tim Mirabito and Akshaya Chandrasekaran
Diversity in the radio news workforce held flat in 2026, with minority representation at 16.6% — unchanged from last year and down from a record 21.5% two years earlier, according to the latest RTDNA/Newhouse School at Syracuse University Survey.
Hispanic/Latino and Native American representation both improved this year, while African American and Asian American numbers declined. Minority radio news director representation rose to 8.8%, though it remains below the brief high-water mark of two years ago, with Native American and Asian American news directors both reporting zero this year.
Regionally, the Northeast joined the South and West among the highest-performing regions for minority news directors, leaving the Midwest trailing for a third consecutive year.
On gender, men continued to outnumber women in radio newsrooms, though both groups saw modest declines — men to 56.1% and women to 42.1% — as the survey expanded for the first time to capture non-binary respondents, who now account for 1.8% of the workforce. Women's representation as news directors and general managers was mixed: women general managers fell back to 23.6% after a gain the previous year, while women news directors gained ground in major and medium markets but lost ground in small and large markets.
Minority general managers roughly doubled to 12.7%, with notable gains among African American and Native American respondents, even as Asian American representation fell to zero.
LGBTQ+ representation continued a multi-year upward trend, with 24.8% of stations reporting LGBTQ+ staff members, up from 15% when the survey first asked four years ago; transgender representation held steady at 17.3%, with commercial stations reporting transgender staff for the first time this year. Market size remained a strong predictor across nearly every diversity measure, with major markets consistently reporting the highest levels of representation.
This annual survey, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2025, drew responses from more than 1,100 television stations and nearly 600 radio stations, and is supported by the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and the Radio Television Digital News Association.