Best Podcasts for Women: Top 10 Empowering Shows (2026)

Based on the beloved 'Dear Sugar' advice column by Cheryl Strayed, Dear Sugars brings literary quality and radical empathy to questions about love, desire, career, identity, and the full complexity of being a woman in the world. Cheryl Strayed's voice — honest, warm, and deeply humane — has resonated particularly with women navigating their thirties, forties, and beyond. No other advice podcast treats every question with this level of respect, nuance, and genuine wisdom.

Modern Love adapts the beloved New York Times essay series into a podcast with celebrity readings. The essays are written by real people — many of them women — about love, loss, desire, and connection across every stage of life. The show centers women's experiences of intimacy, marriage, divorce, grief, and reinvention with the literary quality and emotional depth that has made the column an institution. Essential listening for any woman who has ever loved and lost and loved again.

Nora McInerney is one of the most important women's voices in podcasting. Terrible, Thanks for Asking is her raw, honest, and often funny exploration of the parts of life we don't share politely — grief, loss, illness, trauma, and the messy resilience that follows. McInerney, who lost a pregnancy, her father, and her husband in the same year, speaks about female experience with an authority born of genuine hardship. The show centers women's stories without ever being reductive about them.

Anna Sale built Death, Sex & Money on the radical premise that the conversations women most need to have are exactly the ones they're taught to avoid: money, sex, death, and ambition. The show centers women's voices and women's experiences in a way that feels genuinely empowering rather than patronizing. Sale's interviews with women across every background — including candid conversations about financial independence, sexuality, and career ambition — make this essential listening.

Code Switch is NPR's essential podcast about race, identity, and culture — and it centers women's voices and experiences throughout. The show explores how race, gender, and class intersect in every dimension of American life, with an emphasis on the experiences of women of color navigating these overlapping systems. The journalism is rigorous, the conversations are honest, and the show is essential for any woman who wants to understand how identity shapes opportunity and experience.

Still Processing is two New York Times critics — Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris — thinking out loud about culture, race, and identity. Their conversations range across movies, music, literature, and politics, always returning to the central questions of what it means to be Black in America and how gender and sexuality shape every dimension of cultural life. The show offers the sharpest feminist cultural criticism available in podcast form.

Krista Tippett is one of the most important interviewers working in any medium today. On Being explores the deepest questions of human existence — meaning, love, suffering, faith, and transformation — through conversations that center women's wisdom alongside men's. Tippett's guests include scientists, activists, artists, and spiritual teachers, many of them women, all of them remarkable. The show is essential for any woman seeking to live more intentionally and more fully.

Food Psych, hosted by registered dietitian Christy Harrison, examines the intersection of food, body image, diet culture, and feminist politics. Harrison explores how diet culture exploits and harms women specifically, interviews researchers and activists working on body liberation, and offers an alternative framework — intuitive eating — that centers women's bodily autonomy. Essential listening for any woman who has ever felt at war with her own body.

Maintenance Phase is a meticulously researched and deeply feminist podcast about the wellness industry. Hosts Aubrey Gordon (a fat activist and author) and Michael Hobbes debunk the harmful health myths and pseudoscientific claims that have been used to police and control women's bodies for generations. Their episodes on BMI, the Master Cleanse, and fatphobia in the medical system are some of the most important health journalism produced in any format.

The Dream is a landmark investigative podcast about multi-level marketing — one of the industries most responsible for extracting money from women specifically. The first season meticulously documents how MLMs use cult-like recruiting tactics and false promises of female financial independence to extract money from millions of participants, most of them women. Season two expands into wellness conspiracies. This is feminist investigative journalism at its most consequential.