Daily Reading (02 July 2015)

[nanila]

(Haven't done one of these for a while and today is Dedicated Social Media Catchup Day, so...!)

What have you been reading today? Everything counts, from a novel-length fic to the labels on your washing!

Comments

[nanila]

I'm still gobbling up Skunk Works. It's now gone back in time from the stealth fighter chapters, which ended with successful deployment during Desert Storm, and is about the U-2 spy plane and the origins of the Skunk Works at Lockheed.

I'm enjoying it very much but part of me is pretty bummed out that there are thus far zero female engineers in this book. In fact the only women that have appeared thus far are his wife (briefly) and his secretary (even more briefly - I think she gets half a sentence). I know that in the 1950s (during the U-2's development) it was unlikely, but the stealth fighter was developed in the 1980s and by then there should have been at least a few. Rich addresses the lack of minority engineers (pretty defensively) in a couple of pages where Lockheed/Skunk Works is criticised for not hiring Latino engineers when the plant was so close to a large Latino community ("because they didn't go to engineering school", he replies), but he seems to be oblivious to the gender imbalance.