Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

BILL CATLIN: The idea of a link between gays and high tech has its roots in a common lament of the internet age, the difficulty of keeping promising high-tech firms from leaving for the talent or capital available on the coasts. One case caught the attention of Richard Florida, a regional economic development professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

RICHARD FLORIDA: You know, we do $350 million a year in research and development, which puts us as a top 10 research and development city. We invent things like crazy. And I was pondering the fact that Lycos, which was a company that friends of mine at Carnegie Mellon started, that was incubated in our technology transfer office, relocated to Boston. Because it said talent was more available there.

BILL CATLIN: The Twin Cities has lost firms under similar circumstances. Florida says he began to wonder if the key to economic development was not where companies decide to locate, but where people choose to live. He compared a list of powerhouse high-tech cities, assembled by the Milken Institute in California, with the gay index, a list of cities with disproportionately large gay populations, compiled by another researcher looking at similar questions.

And lo and behold, the list looked the same, clustered at the top, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Washington DC. Some of the same names appeared at the bottom of both lists as well, including Cleveland, Rochester, New York, and Las Vegas. The Twin Cities ranked 17th on the gay index, 19th as a technology center among the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

The research is being published by the Brookings Institution this week. Florida says the gay index was the strongest indicator of high-tech success of any factor he looked at. He also talked to young, high-skilled people in several cities and found they looked for places where it's easy to fit in.

RICHARD FLORIDA: And if you think about technology-based people, or the kinds of people who go to a place like Carnegie Mellon or MIT and study electrical and computer engineering and computer science, they tend to be sometimes describing themselves as geeks. And geeks tend to be the kind of people who are not necessarily the All-American homecoming queen or turkey king in their high school. They tend to be people who are always unique and different.

BILL CATLIN: Florida also found that metro areas ranked high as technology centers if they had large concentrations of people in artistic occupations and foreign-born residents. Florida says there's no cause and effect relationship between a gay population and high tech. He says the gay population is simply a marker for a diverse environment that fosters creativity and innovation, key ingredients for success in high technology. He says the early days of the personal computer industry illustrate the economic importance of a tolerant culture, especially a story he heard from venture capitalist Don Valentine, one of the original investors in Apple Computer.

RICHARD FLORIDA: Steven Jobs came into his office wearing flip-flops and patched blue jeans, and a beard, and long hair. And he said, I didn't care what he looked like. I was going to fund this guy because he had a great idea. Try that in Pittsburgh, or Cleveland, or Rochester, or maybe even Minneapolis. Those people couldn't have gotten in the door. It's not that gays and diversity equal high technology industry. That's not the point. But if your culture is not such that it can accept difference, and uniqueness, and oddity, and eccentricity, you will not get high-tech industry.

BILL CATLIN: Some dismiss the theory, but skepticism is far from universal.

SPEAKER 3: I'm a cross-dresser, a drag queen, cross-dresser, weird, [LAUGHS] whatever.

BILL CATLIN: Here at the Gay 90, it's a Minneapolis gay bar, Larry's not in full regalia, but he is sporting a lacy undershirt and silver nail polish. Larry doesn't want to give his last name, but he says he agrees with the notion that a tolerant culture, open to different ideas, may provide an economic advantage.

SPEAKER 3: The more inventive you get, the more ideas you come up with, which then can spill over into different businesses, different products, different services. Entrepreneurship is about deviant behavior. Economist Joe Cortright is a Portland consultant who's studied high-tech cities. He gave one of the major addresses at the University of Minnesota Economic Summit last fall.

JOE CORTRIGHT: Concrete examples like FedEx, started by Fred Smith, Apple Computer, and others show that the really pathbreaking ideas come from people who are viewing an industry entirely differently and doing things that other people not only didn't think were possible, but didn't even imagine.

MARK WILKEY: So really, what I do is I pass in the request object.

BILL CATLIN: Here at Techies.com, a Twin Cities-based internet job service for technology workers, Staffer Mark Wilkey is explaining some programming to a colleague. Asked about where he feels comfortable, Wilkey expresses a clear preference for employers that don't mind shorts and jeans.

MARK WILKEY: Every, especially, web development company I've been at, nobody really cares what you wear. If I can come in and do my job well, and I code well, and don't cause other people problems, I don't think anybody cares. If I code well, I can smell bad. I think that's the equation.

BILL CATLIN: That preference for an informal environment is fairly typical, says company co-founder and chief techie Doug Berg. But Berg is skeptical of the gay index theory. He agrees technology workers generally prefer an environment open to new ideas and look beyond the eccentricities of capable colleagues. But he says that's a function of a typically intense focus on their work, not any larger devotion to tolerance.

DOUG BERG: I don't think they're going to be diversity champions. But they've already inside become productivity champions that look for accomplishments and challenge. And they look way beyond, I think, what our personality styles and our personal habits are.

BILL CATLIN: Others take issue with the gay index theory as well. Anne Markusen is director of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. She says some high-tech workers are attracted to places that are not diverse.

ANN MARKUSEN: I think I could steer you to a lot of large-scale suburban enclaves with high-tech activities going on in them, which are very White, and very conventional, and even very male, where the diversity that's a part of higher density urban living, gay neighbors, and so on, would not be considered to be a positive attribute.

BILL CATLIN: Dallas and Phoenix, for example, are two of the top 10 tech cities in Richard Florida's adjusted version of the Milken Institute rankings. They ranked 19th and 22nd on the gay index and are both in staunchly conservative states. But Markusen and Florida agree that regional economic development efforts should reorient from chasing corporations to drawing talent. Markusen puts it this way.

ANN MARKUSEN: Workers are less committed to employers, and employers are less committed to workers than ever before. So subsidizing a company or an industry is not necessarily going to result in long-term employment growth and employment commitment.

BILL CATLIN: Richard Florida says companies increasingly go where they can find enough talent because ideas and creativity are key to a firm's or even a region's economic growth.

RICHARD FLORIDA: The point is that those who have the people will have the ability to attract and, moreover, generate the companies and populate those companies. So the real key is understanding that people are the name of the game. And building cities that are attractive to people will put you in a position to compete and win in this new economic development game.

BILL CATLIN: The gay index is likely to remain controversial. But Florida is just one of a number of voices in economic development policy circles who contend that a community's ability to attract and produce talent is increasingly important, even in an era of telecommuting. I'm Bill Catlin, Minnesota Public Radio.