it is nonetheless pleasing to watch a mainstream* television programme that doesn't feel that one woman to five men is really quite enough, but reflects a society, or the ideal of a society, in which 1+1=2.


I gave up reading Cryptonomicon recently because, while it is in many respects exactly my sort of thing (Alan Turing! Spies! World War 2!), I couldn't get over my irritation that Stephenson apparently thinks women make up 0.01 per cent of the population. By the time we were two hundred pages in, out of a cast of thousands there had been only three named female characters, and two of those were there to be love interests.