Well, the short answer is that I don’t know. But that seems to be what Lesley Douglas has been suggesting recently following a backlash against George Lamb. Now I’ve not heard him, so I’ve no idea how good or bad his show is, or what kind of audience it might be attracting.
Douglas is quoted in the piece though:
“The remit absolutely hasn’t changed in the six years it has been on air,” she added.
“What was true of its first few years was that its audience was very male biased. I think it’s only right that you make it as open to female listeners as it is to male. That is something we have tried to address over the years,” she said.
Douglas added that the station could attract more female listeners by changing the way it talks about music and she said giving Lamb the morning slot was part of that process.
“Men tend to be more interested in the intellectual side of the music, the tracks, where albums have been made, that sort of thing,” she said.
“We want to broaden it out – there is absolutely no reason why women shouldn’t love 6Music as much as men love 6Music.”
As the contributors to MediaGuardian’s Media Weekly podcast said, I’m not so sure that this isn’t just a little unfair.
Anyway, I thought that it’d be interesting to have a look at the profile of the BBC’s national radio audiences. First reach:

And here are the hours:

(Source: RAJAR Q4 2007. Reach is defined as the number of different listeners weekly who hear a particular serivce, while hours are determined from the amount of time people actually spend listening to those services).
What’s clear at first is that all the BBC’s main services are more male than female, which considering that the population is only 49% male and 51% female, is a little surprising. Some services are more male than others, with perhaps the least surprising result that Five Live is especially male with its plentiful sports coverage.
But BBC7 is nearly as male as 6Music, which might say something about the greater propensity of men to listen to digital services as much as it does about those services’ appeal to women.
The most female friendly BBC national service seems to be Radio 4 with 55% of listening hours being consumed by women. While the listening hours of 6Music are low at just 36% for women, perhaps Douglas should be more concerned at Radio 1’s strong male bias – 59% of the stations’ hours being male. That’s especially relevant considering that the service is thirty-six times larger than 6Music (The Chris Moyles show is also 59% male and 41% female, incidentally).
(As ever, this blog entry is written in a personal capacity and does not reflect the views of my employer.)
PS Did anyone hear the car-crash radio that was Nicky Campbell “interviewing” Stevie Wonder at a post-Oscar’s party this morning?
[UPDATE] I note that the Google Spreadsheets charts embedded above don’t have the chart values showing (and I can’t see a way of doing that – if you know, please leave a comment), and unlike the charts on the original spreadsheet, you can’t click on a bar to see the underlying values. So, I’ve published the data here should you wish to see the underlying data.