Meet France’s Badass Women of Podcasting

In France, women are leading the podcast boom.

Lory Martinez
Bello Collective

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While the US and the UK podcasting markets work to encourage diversity and gender equality in podcasting through initiatives like WNYC’s Werk It Festival and Spotify’s Sound Up bootcamp for women of color, in France, women are already leading the podcast movement.

86% of the podcast studios founded in France in the last 3 years are owned by women or have at least one female founder. 35% of the top 200 podcasts on France’s Apple Podcast charts are produced or hosted by women, compared to just 10% in the US.

Many of these podcasteuses (French for female podcaster) are former print and digital journalists, finding solace in a new medium where they can take the lead. Whether they’re using narrative formats to transport listeners, or interviews and roundtable discussions to have frank conversations about culture and society, these women are using podcasting to break barriers and change the narrative around women in media.

The Rise of Louie Media

In early 2018, Charlotte Pudlowski and Melissa Bounoua founded Louie Media, a studio dedicated to creating narrative podcasts, after quitting their jobs at Slate France. Their goal?

“We want to make people feel the world,” Pudlowski said.

Melissa Bounoua and Charlotte Pudlowski Co-Founders of Louie Media

Pudlowski and Bounoua met during a study abroad session at the University of Missouri in 2008. They were just starting out as journalists, and became friends, eventually ending up together at Slate France where they would both rise through the ranks to become editors.

Pudlowski has always had a passion for audio and successfully pitched her first French podcast, Transfert, to Slate’s team back in 2017. The podcast, which would become Louie Media’s flagship show, is largely inspired by The Living Room episode of the Love and Radio podcast, in which a woman retells the story of her voyeuristic obsession with a couple she can see through the window of her living room. This kind of confessional format prompted Pudlowski to tell long-form audio stories that could inspire the same feeling she had when she heard it. After a year, Transfert would build their audience to over 350,000 downloads per month, and was one of the first podcasts independent podcasts to enter the Top 10 on France’s Apple Podcasts charts. As for Bounoua, she’s been co-hosting an independent podcast on digital trends called Studio 404, since 2012. When Louie Media began, her passion for food would eventually make its way into another Louie Media podcast, Plan Culinaire, a narrative style show that explores food trends.

Plan Culinaire, Louie Media’s food podcast

The two shared their passion for podcasts with each other for months, ruminating over the idea of creating their own podcast studio, hoping to follow the example set by Gimlet and Pineapple Street Media in the US, but it was hard to get things going at first. “It wasn’t just one conversation, it was more like 400,” explained Pudlowski. “But then one day we were at the gym talking about work and I just said: Let’s do it. Let’s start this thing together, and then there was no going back.”

They both quit Slate France in October 2017 and decided to spend a few days in New York visiting studios they admired. They met with Gimlet’s Alex Blumberg and Pineapple Street Media’s Jenna Weiss Berman who offered tips on how to build their business model: in-house content and a content team dedicated to branded partnerships. Louie Media’s Louie Creative branch was created to mirror Gimlet Creative, and accompanies brands and influencers looking to enter the podcast scene.

Since its launch, Louie Media has successfully produced 11 new podcasts — including branded podcast partnerships with Madame Le Figaro and Birchbox — and they have 7 more shows in the works. And with an all-female production team and an ever-evolving podcast landscape, they’re excited to see what the future will bring. “On a des envies démesurés!” Charlotte exclaimed. “We have an insatiable desire to make it.”

Making Waves with House of Podcasts

House of Podcasts was also founded in the Spring of 2018 with one purpose: to share stories that haven’t been heard before. Founders Françoise Nottrelet and Qéhie Jasari come from the film and television realms, and their transition to podcasting was, if anything, a natural one. “Our attention has often been drawn to images and videos, not audio. But that’s changing. Producing podcasts gives (people) real freedom of expression without limits,” said Jasari.

Qéhie Jasari and Françoise Nottrelet, Co-Founders of House of Podcasts

Though podcasting is relatively new in France — there are about 1,500 French language podcasts on Apple Podcasts — there is already a wealth of programming dedicated to topics like entrepreneurship, technology, true crime, pop culture and more. Even so, the two saw that there was still room to create the kind of content they would want to listen to.

And so House of Podcasts was born. They launched with three in-house shows: Spritz on entrepreneurship, Deéses, on cross-cultural experiences, and L’instant Sophro, on self-care and wellness. House of Podcast programming emphasizes cross-cultural experiences and inclusivity. “[For example], with Spritz, we knew there were already a ton of entrepreneurial podcasts, and “women in business” podcasts, but I wanted to go further; I wanted to feature a variety of entrepreneurial voices. No one thinks a Pakistani Frenchman is going to be heading a startup. All we hear about minorities is the struggle, never success. I wanted to change that,” said Nottrelet.

As a content director at Afrostream, an online television station dedicated to Afro-centric content in French, Nottrelet was determined to make inclusion central to the content she helped create. She was behind the creation of Le Tchip podcast, the streaming platform’s first foray into podcasting back in 2016. When choosing the hosts, she knew she had to include a woman’s voice so that the conversation could include all views.

“Inclusion is the responsibility of the decision makers. Now we’re the decision makers,” she added, smiling.

Coming from the television realm, Nottrelet understood that content is can be multiplied into different formats. “Whether it’s a podcast, film or television series, the important thing is to tell good stories. When you have a good story, you have so many possibilities,” she said. “When we started working on Déeses with [Jasari], I thought it was just going to be one podcast. But I realized we could do more,” she said. Déeses was the first show they imagined for House of Podcasts and serves as the basis for the kinds of stories the studio aims to share. The show is a frank conversation with a female guest on subjects they deal with every day: intersectional feminism, the myth of the Parisian woman, what it’s like living in a double culture and so on.

Déeses was House of Podcasts’ first podcast

Jesari cohosts Déeses with Nottrelet. A film producer by trade, Jasari has worked on over 15 documentary films and launched her own video production studio, Cocktail Productions, back in 2004. Her content has always focused on the subject of identity and cultural transmission and her film background helped her imagine House of Podcasts as something that could eventually go further than just audio.

Nottrelet believes in the power of podcasting in France. “I knew there was a space for my vision in French podcasting. I never hesitated. I never placed boundaries on what I could do. I think that’s what’s so great about the women currently launching shows and studios all over France — we’re realizing we don’t need permission to do what we want. And it’s about time.”

Since its launch, House of Podcasts has produced 3 shows, and has 7 projects in the works, including interview and fiction formats. Nottrelet is excited to see what’s next for women in podcasting: “Let’s break the idea that the only thing we care about is lipstick and shoes; those things are great, but we can do more. It’s about time we made ourselves heard. We are in charge of our own stories now.”

#LongLiveLesPodcasteuses

Outside of studios, independent producers are also making their mark.

Nearly every week there is a new show launch that touches on a myriad of topics from sex and sexuality to motherhood, food and entrepreneurship. Each one was launched with the goal of sharing stories they felt needed to be heard — but it’s more than just passion driving these indie podcasteuses, it’s activism.

Noémie Gmur, for example, started Entre Eux Deux in 2018 because she wanted to shed light on different kinds of relationships, the kind that fall outside the heteronormative, monogamous norm. “I remember meeting a fellow podcasteuse at a meetup and she told me: make the podcast you would want to listen to, and I did. There’s a real space for women in podcasting (here in France), there’s so much that we can do!”

Pauline Mallet, a cinema critic, was inspired to launch her podcast, SoroCiné on women in cinema after finding that most of the shows she’d heard on the radio were hosted by men, and often left out the female perspective. “This show is about what I care about, as a female journalist and cinema critic. The goal is to link them together to start a conversation and make a change.”

Florence Dell’Aeira is a book publisher whose podcast Restez dans le flow aims to inspire women who have gone through trauma to move forward with their lives in the wake of #metoo. Through frank discussions about therapy, work-life balance and more, Florence wants her listeners to feel more resilient. “I made it so I would feel less alone in my experience, and [to] help others by sharing how one can make it through. [In producing,] I’m not looking for perfection. It’s just me and it feels amazing.”

These podcasteuses have taken a fearless leap into the audio world, using it as a tool for free expression and empowerment here in France. Hopefully, their stories will inspire badass podcast women around the world to make waves too.

One final note: there are countless amazing podcasts led by women in France that aren’t mentioned here and I invite curious Bello readers to check out more of the brilliant studio work from Louie Media and House of Podcasts as well as work from other female-led studios: Binge Audio and Nouvelles Écoutes.

Check out to the French Women of Podcasting Collection on RadioPublic.

The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.

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Colombian-American podcast producer based in Paris, France. Host & EP @mijapodcast, Founder @ochentapodcasts Tweets in EN, FR, ES @lorymart1nez