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This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

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In the past week I’ve blogged about an urban skunk I encountered in Riverside Park;  a great new espionage novel called The Double Game by Dan Fesperman; the shameful lack of recognition for women in tech, as revealed by Change the Ratio’s Rachel Sklar; a well-deserved honor for Jim Tully: American Writer, Hollywood Brawler, Irish Rover, my fave biography of 2011; the lack of public transportation for wage-earners which means they often can’t get to jobs they would otherwise be able to fill; a new genetics study that may shed light on how the Americas were peopled in prehistoric times; a personal essay I’m contributing to a new book called Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology; Mitt Romney’s most secret offshore investment, Mitt and Ann’s Jet-Ski vacation, and a NY Times Editorial that hit Mitt. I also put up a guest post by my son Ewan Turner, a blended short story that fuses an actual incident from Bob Dylan’s career with an imagined episode involving the singer.

Over at The Great Gray Bridge tumblr, my site for quick hits and diverting photography, I put up a photo of Donald Trump that the Scots must find hilarious (h/t TPM and Zuma Press/Newscom and a post about the personal effects of lawman Eliot Ness, which have been put for auction.

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Rachel Sklar, Changing the Ratio one Mind at a Time

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I admire Rachel Sklar’s Change the Ratio initiative, from which she advocates for a more equitable proportion of women in tech fields, and now want to recommend this column of hers about the recent list of major tech influencers from Newsweek/Daily Beast that unaccountably managed to identify only 7 women listed out of 100 total standouts. To the credit of  Newsweek/Daily Beast they solicited Rachel’s critique and are running it in their own pages, but the lingering question is, “Why does this list skew list so heavily toward men?”

Rachel’s analysis makes clear that the answer to that question goes well beyond what simply happened in this one instance. She offers many women candidates who could have been included and closes her piece on an admonitory note,

“
Next year, please don’t make me write this article again.”

H/t Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum for his editorial in TechPresident, “Let’s Change the Ration Once and For All,” which first brought Rachel’s column to my attention.

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