Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Thomas A. Beckett" <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

... We need more gays!  

        The Washington Post has an article today examining the correlation
between the prominence of a region in the IT boom with the predominance
of its homozexual population.  Apparently the more queers who live
there, the more "successful" an area is in the information technology.  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52561-2000Oct31.html

        Does this mean that the CED should be dropping flyers about RTP career
and quality of life opportunities in gay bars around San Francisco, New
York and Chicago?  Does this mean that gay-friendly Durham is poised to
overtake Cary and Chapel Hill in numbers of high tech startups?  I never
thought of Austin, TX, as a gay mecca.  Like the article says:  What
does it /mean/?   

TaB

Excerpt:  

        "The eureka moment happened when he saw numbers compiled by one of his
doctoral students, Gary J. Gates, on concentrations of gays living in
metropolitan areas--numbers published with another author last May in
Demography, a peer-reviewed journal of the Population Association of
America.

          "Florida took Gates's rankings of areas. He compared them with
the Milken Institute's "Tech-Pole" rankings of high-tech presence in
metropolitan areas. He discovered to his surprise that the number one
thing that correlates with a region's high-tech success is the
concentration of gay people living there.

          "Close behind were concentrations of people with college
degrees and people who fit into the Carnegie Mellon researchers'
Bohemian index--people who identify themselves to the U.S. Census as
artists, craftspersons and musicians.  

          "But gay concentration led the list.

          "Could that be right? Could there be a connection between gays
and high-tech success? Even if this idea turns into conventional wisdom
when The Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy
publishes the paper later this fall as part of its series on the new
economy, the question still has to be asked:

          "What does this mean?"