Where are the girl nerds? “On the whole, the culture that develops around computers at a college or university is unlikely to be attractive to those who have been trained to value interpersonal relations, as most young women have,” writes Eric Roberts in Tough Questions (Fall 1989). “More than any other scientific endeavor, computer science, and particularly programming, has a tendency to encourage highly focused behavior almost to the point of obsession. In our culture, males are given greater license to be obsessive….This is a very difficult issue in that it is hard to find the source of discriminatory intent in the face of obvious discriminatory effect.”
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Looking for a tailor. According to Ed Zotti in Chicago Enterprise (December 1989), developers Albert Ratner and Gerald Fogelson “have three things: an idea, a real estate sales contract, and brass. The idea is that there is a big market for ‘back-office’ space near downtown Chicago. The sales contract is for 71 acres of old railroad property in the South Loop, for which they’ve agreed to pay $18 million. The brass is what enables them to ask the city for $210 million to put said property into usable condition” to become a mixed-use complex called Central Station. “Railroad land can be had for $5-10 a square foot, compared to $150 and up–way up–for prime Loop property. Trouble is, railroad land reposes in the inner-city equivalent of the state of nature, innocent of such niceties as streets and sewers. It’s like a fifty-buck Hong Kong suit–it just needs $210 million worth of alterations.”
Your tax dollars at work. The state Department of Professional Regulation recently admonished a Hoffman Estates real estate salesperson and fined her $50 because “she placed an ad in a newspaper in which her name appeared in larger print than the name of the real estate company.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
