Reading material

If anybody ever wants to go to any of the events at Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh or at The Calder Bookshop on The Cut then just say the word. C&P recently had that Zadie Smith talking about her Orange Prize winner On Beauty.

Any more votes for unread novels that might form the basis of a book group? Currently, only Amsterdam by Ian McEwan gets votes. What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant are supposed to be good and there's stuff on the 2005 Booker Prize longlist that is nagging away.

Gay pay in the UK

Did you know that, on average, gay men in the UK earn 1% less than straight men? And that once you control for various factors (eg the higher likelihood of gay men to live in London, which has higher pay than the rest of the country), gay men actually earn an average of 6% less than straight men?

I discovered this unfortunate fact while reading a short research paper entitled Gay Pay in the UK (which I can email to anyone who's interested). The authors can't figure out why there's a gay pay gap for males. Discrimination would seem the most likely answer. They do note that this gap hasn't shrunk since legislation a few years ago designed to prevent workplace discrimination against non-straights.

But if it's bad news for the boys in the Spartan army, the ladies of Lesbos are laughing. On average, lesbians make a whopping 35% more than straight women. Once factors such as education and regional location are controlled for, lesbians still earn 11% more. I'm guessing that while some of this is attributable to Anna, it's mostly down to the career compromises that women are often forced to make once they have kids. I'd be interested in seeing data comparing lesbians with children to lesbians without, but this paper didn't address that.

The Face of Tomorrow

This photographer has taken hundreds of photographs of men and women who live in cities across the world. For each city he has digitally composed one face for men and one for women in an attempt to visualise what that city's future inhabitants might look like. For reasons which he explains on the project site, it's not census proportioned, tourism interferes, and the male and female faces tend to look similar. Here's the future face of London.

Rest of the project at The Face of Tomorrow

His other photographs might appeal to certain amongst you - Istanbul Mike

He mentions Nancy Burson as another photographer looking at related ideas.