“Retarded” has always had a pejorative connotation. Back in the day, degrees of mental retardation as measured by IQ tests carried labels including imbecile, idiot and moron. These words too are more often used as insults than descriptors. In the early sixties families and communities caring for developmentally disabled children found a less loaded label in the term “neurologically handicapped.” But this is such a catch-all phrase that it includes recovering polio patients, cerebral palsy victims, Down syndrome children, paraplegics handicapped by war wounds and many, many more. “Developmentally disabled” has more recently emerged as an acceptable and descriptive euphemism for mental retardation.

We need euphemisms because of the cruel and indiscriminate use of the R word that begins on the playground and ends in the White House. Just as people with other than heterosexual preference have been offended by the “Q word,” Americans of African descent abjure the “N word,” and every other ethnic or culturally different group contends with some kind of appallingly pejorative label applied by a socially dominant caste, so are the developmentally disabled hurt by the R word. The insult carried by some of these appellations can be blunted. For example, the sexuality and gender identity-based culture that was “the gay community” eventually embraced the Q word and became the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered and Queer community.

The coarse humor and aggressive posturing of pre-adolescents (“You queer!” “You retard!”) forming their own identities and groups can be moderated and modified by parents and teachers, but there will–I believe–always be otherization as a way to cement cultural identity. Raising children to recognize and value differences is a way to develop a welcoming, friendly community. Children who think differences involve some kind of zero-sum transaction (“You’re queer, I’m not!”) will grow up to become the Dick Cheneys, the Rahm Emanuels, the Rush Limbaughs of the future.

As a Democrat I’m left with the thought that Rahm Emanuel may be, like Dick Cheney, a morally stunted, aggressive prick; but–he’s OUR morally stunted, aggressive prick. The Wall Street Journal has snookered us again with well timed dysinformation. The good that came out of it was the conversation about our concerns for the well being of people who are hurt by thoughtless, uncaring name calling.

I’d rather blame Christians, that oppressed group of true believers who—when urged to “turn the other cheek”—are totally lacking in a sense of humor. Faith is color blind… except, I suppose, for the Mormons. In any event, I was saddened to hear a friend in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer community say that she thought blacks should understand discrimination and therefore oppose Prop. 8. The following excerpt from an SFGate article reflects my thoughts too:

… demographers say the focus on one race not only disregards the complexity of African American identity but also overlooks the most powerful predictors affecting views on same-sex marriage: religion, age and ideology, such as party affiliation. Prop. 8’s racial fallout raises the question of how the groundbreaking multiracial support of a presidential candidate could coincide with the racial scapegoating now following a failed state ballot campaign.

“It’s just a shame to see the sort of coalition that came out behind Obama, and then you come back to California and you see white gays say ‘black people cost us the election,’ ” said David Binder, a white gay San Franciscan and a polling expert who spent the past two years working for the Obama campaign. “It bothers me that people look at the race of the people involved rather than factors that are more explanatory.”

Raymond Leon Roker said in the Huffington Post last week:

Excuse me? I voted against Proposition 8. I’m among the 30 percent of black Californians that did so. And as much as I can condemn the homophobia and intolerance that drove a portion of the 70 percent of blacks that voted in favor of Proposition 8’s ban on gay marriage, it’s an outrage to lay its passage at their feet. I’ve read several editorials already about how the ungrateful blacks betrayed gays right after America gave them their first president. I know there are some wounds and frayed nerves right now, but this type of condescending, divide and conquer isn’t going to help at all. And it’s a gross oversimplification of what happened.

Blacks, whites, Latinos… and everyone else who went to church in California before the election was likely to have heard a call for the passage of Proposition 8 based on Christian principles. What the LGBTQ community needs to do is meet their Christian friends in their homes, their workplaces, and their neighborhoods and educate them, convince them of the righteousness of supporting equal rights for residents of the State of California and the USA. The gay rights message needs to be spread simply and directly. The protests happening now are great in terms of reminding people that an injustice has been done by the passage of this referendum proposition, but to win the next referendum more minds need to be changed and it’s my opinion that demonstrations aren’t likely to change those minds.

Thanks Zo.

Derivatives

Charlie and I are of one mind in how we feel about derivatives and the trading activities that go with them: We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.

Having delivered that thought, which I’ll get back to, let me retreat to explaining derivatives, though the explanation must be general because the word covers an extraordinarily wide range of financial contracts. Essentially, these instruments call for money to change hands at some future date, with the amount to be determined by one or more reference items, such as interest rates, stock prices or currency values. If, for example, you are either long or short an S&P 500 futures contract, you are a party to a very simple derivatives transaction – with your gain or loss derived from movements in the index. Derivatives contracts are of varying duration (running sometimes to 20 or more years) and their value is often tied to several variables.

Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the
creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses – often huge in amount – in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands.

The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). At Enron, for example, newsprint and broadband derivatives, due to be settled many years in the future, were put on the books. Or say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2024. No problem – at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

When we purchased Gen Re, it came with General Re Securities, a derivatives dealer that Charlie and I didn’t want, judging it to be dangerous. We failed in our attempts to sell the operation, however, and are now terminating it.

But closing down a derivatives business is easier said than done. It will be a great many years before
we are totally out of this operation (though we reduce our exposure daily). In fact, the reinsurance and derivatives businesses are similar: Like Hell, both are easy to enter and almost impossible to exit. In either industry, once you write a contract – which may require a large payment decades later – you are usually stuck with it. True, there are methods by which the risk can be laid off with others. But most strategies of that kind leave you with residual liability.

Another commonality of reinsurance and derivatives is that both generate reported earnings that are
often wildly overstated. That’s true because today’s earnings are in a significant way based on estimates whose inaccuracy may not be exposed for many years.

Errors will usually be honest, reflecting only the human tendency to take an optimistic view of one’s
commitments. But the parties to derivatives also have enormous incentives to cheat in accounting for them. Those who trade derivatives are usually paid (in whole or part) on “earnings” calculated by mark-to-market accounting. But often there is no real market (think about our contract involving twins) and “mark-to-model” is utilized. This substitution can bring on large-scale mischief. As a general rule, contracts involving multiple reference items and distant settlement dates increase the opportunities for counterparties to use fanciful assumptions. In the twins scenario, for example, the two parties to the contract might well use differing models allowing both to show substantial profits for many years. In extreme cases, mark-to-model degenerates into what I would call mark-to-myth.

Of course, both internal and outside auditors review the numbers, but that’s no easy job. For
example, General Re Securities at yearend (after ten months of winding down its operation) had 14,384
contracts outstanding, involving 672 counterparties around the world. Each contract had a plus or minus value derived from one or more reference items, including some of mind-boggling complexity. Valuing a portfolio like that, expert auditors could easily and honestly have widely varying opinions.

The valuation problem is far from academic: In recent years, some huge-scale frauds and near-frauds
have been facilitated by derivatives trades. In the energy and electric utility sectors, for example, companies used derivatives and trading activities to report great “earnings” – until the roof fell in when they actually tried to convert the derivatives-related receivables on their balance sheets into cash. “Mark-to-market” then turned out to be truly “mark-to-myth.”

I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical.
Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive “earnings” (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham.

Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into
for completely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.

Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay
off much of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counterparties tend to build up over time. (At Gen Re Securities, we still have $6.5 billion of receivables, though we’ve been in a liquidation mode for nearly a year.) A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to be diversified and therefore not dangerous. Under certain circumstances, though, an exogenous event that causes the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z. History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times.

In banking, the recognition of a “linkage” problem was one of the reasons for the formation of the
Federal Reserve System. Before the Fed was established, the failure of weak banks would sometimes put sudden and unanticipated liquidity demands on previously-strong banks, causing them to fail in turn. The Fed now insulates the strong from the troubles of the weak. But there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives. In these industries, firms that are fundamentally solid can become troubled simply because of the travails of other firms further down the chain. When a “chain reaction” threat exists within an industry, it pays to minimize links of any kind. That’s how we conduct our reinsurance business, and it’s one reason we are exiting derivatives.

Many people argue that derivatives reduce systemic problems, in that participants who can’t bear
certain risks are able to transfer them to stronger hands. These people believe that derivatives act to stabilize the economy, facilitate trade, and eliminate bumps for individual participants. And, on a micro level, what they say is often true. Indeed, at Berkshire, I sometimes engage in large-scale derivatives transactions in order to facilitate certain investment strategies.

Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large
amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one other. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by non-dealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I’ve mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.

Indeed, in 1998, the leveraged and derivatives-heavy activities of a single hedge fund, Long-Term
Capital Management, caused the Federal Reserve anxieties so severe that it hastily orchestrated a rescue effort. In later Congressional testimony, Fed officials acknowledged that, had they not intervened, the outstanding trades of LTCM – a firm unknown to the general public and employing only a few hundred people – could well have posed a serious threat to the stability of American markets. In other words, the Fed acted because its leaders were fearful of what might have happened to other financial institutions had the LTCM domino toppled. And this affair, though it paralyzed many parts of the fixed-income market for weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario.

One of the derivatives instruments that LTCM used was total-return swaps, contracts that facilitate
100% leverage in various markets, including stocks. For example, Party A to a contract, usually a bank, puts up all of the money for the purchase of a stock while Party B, without putting up any capital, agrees that at a future date it will receive any gain or pay any loss that the bank realizes.

Total-return swaps of this type make a joke of margin requirements. Beyond that, other types of
derivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms around the risk profiles of banks, insurers and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investors and analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavily involved with derivatives contracts. When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don’t understand how much risk the institution is running.

The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly
multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Knowledge of how dangerous
they are has already permeated the electricity and gas businesses, in which the eruption of major troubles caused the use of derivatives to diminish dramatically. Elsewhere, however, the derivatives business continues to expand unchecked. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts.

Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength – for the sake of our
owners, creditors, policyholders and employees. We try to be alert to any sort of megacatastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly apprehensive about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.

Almost, all financial derivatives display asymmetric payoffs. All sold (short) option positions and sold (short) derivatives positions – something that banks, financial institutions, hedge funds and even corporations engage in regularly these days – are negatively skewed bets. These short portfolio positions will produce negative skew for the trader. He will be fooled by the variance (volatility) of the process, as the observed variance (volatility) would be lower than the true variance most of the time. This would mean the more the skewness in the distribution (of the portfolio) the more the variance will be concentrated in a small slice of time and for most part it will generate steady returns. And the trader will think that he is making money, albeit in small proportions but steadily. And then after a while – could be a long wait – the true variance will wipe out all those gains.

Look for the Netroots conference and you’ll find coverage in the New York times Politics section. Look for BlogHer and you’ll find it in the women’s pages, the New York times Fashion and Style section.

Erin Kotecki Vest has already commented on this in her own space, Queen of Spain, and via the Huffington Post, but I thought I’d try to amplify her observation. Erin is, after all, a woman and so she is likely to be a bit shrill about these matters. (The humor impaired are invited to leave now.)

Kara Jesella, author of the New York Times piece on the 2024 BlogHer conference writes for Fashion & Style. Her March 27, 2024 article centering on a vegan strip club in Portland and addressing larger issues of sexism in the vegan/vegetarian community was in Fashion & Style, not Entertainment, Politics, or Health. Her article about MomsRising, Mom’s Mad. and She’s Organized (2/22/2007) did NOT appear in the Politics section.

Her article about librarianship (that linked to Jessamyn West’s librarian.net) did not appear in the Arts section, the Technology section, nor the Science section. It appeared in Fashion & Style. And her article about women’s clavicles did not appear in Health. Ms. Jesella’s work is bound for the Women’s Section at the New York Times, a section that they have renamed “Style” in a bow to political correctness without a gesture of respect for the cultural shift that mandated the name change.

Eventually, of course, the women’s movement dribbled off the back pages and into the news. Women at major papers and magazines filed class-action sex-discrimination suits. The ever-dependable housewife market collapsed. And so, in 1969, The Washington Post transformed For and About Women into the much-copied Style section. The Los Angeles Times introduced View in 1970, The Chicago Tribune started Tempo in 1971, and The New York Times made the transition with its Style pages several years after that. [emphasis added]

I’ve written about this subject here recently… “The New York Times on Web Girls.” Not much has changed since then. Writers on “the women’s beat” (usually women themselves) place their work in the Style section of the New York Times. BlogHer attracts writers on “the women’s beat.” A good NYT Politics story could have come out of BlogHer. A good NYT Technology story could have come out of BlogHer. A good NYT Business story could have come out of BlogHer.

Of course a NYT Business story did come out about BlogHer on July 17th. Headline: NBC Universal Posts $5 Million on BlogHer.… And another NYT Business story contained references to BlogHer: Slumber Parties Go Digital. In fact BlogHer public relations has managed to position their press release material in a lot of publications, but there remains the nagging question of why the serious business and technology writers aren’t in the room covering the BlogHer story as it unfolds. Could it be because the women tech writers don’t want to cover women per se, and the men tech writers might feel less than comfortable in the room? Perhaps, but if that’s the case then there are a lot of writers missing some dynamite feature stories.

[tags]blogher, jory des jardins, lisa stone, elisa camahort, gabrielle anwar, kara jesella, erin kotecki vest, healthy clavicles[/tags]

But when Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle set up a Commission on supposed “racial disparity” in the Wisconsin criminal justice system, he not only asserted that the disparity is real (which it is) but that it is undesirable. Indeed, his commission is called “The Commission on Reducing Racial Disparities in the Wisconsin Justice System.” It’s true he directed the Commission to “[d]etermine whether discrimination is built into the criminal justice system at each stage of the criminal justice continuum of arrest through parole.” But then he told it to [r]ecommend strategies and solutions to reduce the racial disparity in the Wisconsin criminal justice system. . . .”

It might seem, on first glance, that “racial disparity”—and here the issue is that blacks are jailed and imprisoned at a much higher rate than whites—is a bad thing.

But what if the disparity is the result of the fact that blacks commit more crimes than whites? Looking back at the Governor’s charge to the Commission, if it’s not established that the disparities are the result of discrimination, how do we know we want to eliminate them? And what if incarceration in fact serves highly desirable goals of deterring crime and incapacitating the criminals? If so, the Commission is on a fool’s errand, instructed to recommend things that will make the quality of life in Wisconsin worse. And particularly worse for black people.

Probably McAdams didn’t have the data that white adults commit more drug crimes than black adults, but far fewer whites end up in jail for these crimes than blacks.

That disgusting application of narrow logic and high school debate technique to real problems is part of the reason it’s so difficult to make progress in these matters.

I’ve looked around. I don’t see any follow-up this week in any of the Wisconsin dailies. I’m sure there were a flurry of local broadcast news stories that rode on the Journal-Sentinel story that day, but that’s it. News-cycle over. The so-called “news-cycle” is a joke. People kowtow to the media, warp events to assure maximum exposure on the late news, because — well –if the story doesn’t run the day it all happens, then it isn’t news, is it?

“What you reading?” I asked.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” she said, a little frown at the corner of her lips.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s okay. I mean it’s good. But I just think about a little black child or Mexican kid readin’ this in school. They look at Holden Caulfield’s life an’ think, Damn, this kid got it good. What’s he so upset about?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “So much we know that they never think about, and so much they think about without a thought about us.”

I didn’t have to tell Gara who they and us were. We lived in a they-and-us world while they lived, to all appearances, alone.
— Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith

Where does this story of the American gulags start? It’s correct but facile to trace its roots to 17th century slavery in North America. The white flight to the suburbs in the fifties simply underscored the white bigotry and racism that emerged after the civil war to continue to dominate those who had been enslaved. If black people were moving in, then white people had to move out. It was about property values they said, as they smiled pleasantly, and withdrew from onerous contact with the black pariahs.

In the sixties white people started to feel confused. The feelings of entitlement hadn’t gone away, but the insularity, the sense of being simply “us” in a world where black people were invisible was challenged by federal law, and by an assertiveness welling up in the black community, an assertiveness that was on one hand principled, powerful, and orderly, and on the other hand riotous, chaotic and frightening. The Watts riots in 1965, the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the emerging strength of the civil rights and black power movements, growing from the work for integration and fair wages in the fifties to radical community support efforts in the seventies — all heightened white Americans’ awareness of the disparities and discrimination limiting opportunities for black Americans to find equality of treatment and opportunity anywhere in America. And that growing white awareness included an unhealthy element of fear.

The population density and ghettoized conditions of black people living in urban neighborhoods in many if not most American cities, and the structural unemployment of black workers that ran at about double the rate for white workers fed a growing culture of alienation among the poor.

I think it’s interesting that one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the dynamics that drive these conditions is essentially forbidden by the strong taboo in American culture against any analysis that smacks of “Marxism.” The obvious class distinctions that cut across color lines, the impoverished people — white or black — share common needs and live in similar circumstances. A working class of people who are doing their best to provide for their families and are fortunate enough to have stable employment, exists and it is comprised of blacks and whites. A middle class of salaried people, professionals, and business owners has higher income and more opportunities than the working class that has more limited choices and lower incomes. Wealth itself is color blind, although wealthy people obviously are not. Regardless, an upper class of wealthy people has characteristics, needs, and influence unrelated to color but highly correlated to the opening opportunities of education and association that comes with wealth.

To even begin to discuss the disparities in justice administration revealed in the reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel cited last Tuesday, we’ll have to agree that the people concerned, the inmates and the enforcers, are bound by prejudices and class distinctions, driven by attitudes of fear and alienation, and sorely in need of help everywhere in “the system.”

Here are a couple of links that I’ll try to write about soon…
The Sentencing Project… some findings:

• Since the inception of the “war on drugs” in 1980, there have been more
  than 31 million arrests for drug offenses in the United States.
• In the nation’s largest cities, drug arrests for African Americans rose at three
  times the rate for whites from 1980 to 2024, 225% compared to 70%. This
  disparity is not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug use.
• In 11 cities, black drug arrests rose by more than 500% from 1980 to 2024.
• The extreme variation in city-level drug arrests suggests that policy and
  practice decisions, and not overall rates of drug use, are responsible for much
  of this disparity.

Human Rights Watch — Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States

The racial disparities in incarceration generated by drug control strategies raise deeply troubling questions. Why are white drug users and sellers comparatively free of arrest and incarceration for their illegal activity? Why has the United States continued to address illicit drugs primarily with a punitive criminal justice approach, including harsh prison sentences? Why has the country been willing to impose the burden of incarceration for drug offenses primarily on those who by virtue of race and poverty are already among the most marginalized in society and the most politically powerless?

1.6 million Americans are in prison.

But Cheney is on the outside. And George Bush is on the outside. And the Keating five are on the outside. That entire mafia of American upper class privilege strips the wealth of the nation, destroys lives around the globe, operates outside the law and gets away with it, while inner-city hard-cases get cracked for a little weed and put away for years where they won’t be cluttering up the unemployment statistics.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2024. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States (pdf file), also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women.

What was it Pogo the ‘possum used to say? “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17).

The quote above is from an article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, who writes for the New York Times Fashion-Style section(s). The article’s placement makes Mary Hodder angry. Hodder says,

So when they interview people like Doc Searls or [Loic LeMeur] or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion.

Can you tell I’m pissed? WTF?

While she has a point, she could make it more judiciously. Working for the Fashion-Style section, Rosenbloom has written loads of features like this on the quotidian emergence of webby trends. One of my favorites was on Atoosa Rubenstein’s Alpha Kitty YouTube series inspired by the book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B, and Back Again.” In that article, Rosenbloom asks regarding Rubenstein,

Can this old-media veteran make it in the virtual world, where so many others have stumbled?

One thing going for her is that teenage girls are more socially active than boys online and are more likely than boys to participate in blogs, bulletin boards and chat forums, according to Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com.

I think that’s the point she was sharpening with the article that put Hodder’s knickers in a twist.

*** UPDATE ***

Mary Hodder has revised the post at Napsterization, deleting the reference to Shirky and referencing instead Loic LeMeur. She’s also temporized nicely to include assurances that her post wasn’t “about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw)….” She goes on to say, “My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.” I’ve left a comment asking if she’d care to share the reasons for that update. My comment remains in her moderation queue.

I think I understand why the four females featured (ages 13, 14, 16 and 17) aren’t found yet in the Technology section with Doc and David; but, the feature itself is well placed to pick up a readership of young females who — we hope — will have their techno-interests validated and affirmed by their peers in Rosenbloom’s story. Rosenbloom acknowledges,

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In American high schools, girls comprised fewer than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2024, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2024 to 2024, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

It should be obvious to even the most committed feminist that spreading the word about the disparity, giving it the widest possible exposure, including in the Style-Fashion sections of the newspaper, is a positive gesture.I’m glad that people writing on the fashion beat are clued in to what’s happening in pop tech. Mary Hodder should be glad too.

[tags]whoa, no money quote from danah boyd, wtf[/tags]