Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 5, 2017

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REAL LIFE NEWS: REAL LIFE BOND BOFFIN IS FEMALE

by Hazed

In the James Bond series of books and films, the secret service boffin who gives the spy all his amazing gadgets is called Q. The character has been played by a series of actors over the years, most recently Ben Wishaw, but they have had one thing in common: they have all been men.

But we found out recently that the current real life equivalent of Q is a woman.

The chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, was speaking at the Women in IT awards. He said, “The real-life Q is looking forward to meeting you and I’m pleased to report that the real-life Q is a woman.”

This was part of a speech in which he said he wanted to make MI6 more diverse which meant getting past the James Bond stereotype. While he said that the fictional MI6 spy is great in some ways as it “means that all of our opponents think there’s an MI6 officer behind every bush and that we’re 10,000 times larger than we actually are”, he went on to say that the character leads to a stereotype of the “particular sort of person that will join MI6 – whether they’re really posh or going to Oxford”.

I suspect that the real life Q doesn’t have quite the range of exciting and futuristic gadgets to offer spies that we see in the films.

But maybe the movie-makers could pay attention to this and make the boffin in future films a woman.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38755032

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