Significant Digits For Friday, March 9, 2018


You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

82 percent

Percentage of residents training to be gynecologists who are women, part of an enormous shift that’s taken place in the field over generations. In 1970, 7 percent of OB-GYNs were women; now 59 percent are, and that number is poised to rise to two-thirds by 2025. [The Los Angeles Times]


108 Republicans

President Trump has implemented new taxes on imports — steel gets a 25 percent tariff and aluminum a 10 percent tariff. The president’s National Economic Council Director resigned over the decision earlier this week, and 108 House Republicans expressed concerns to the president in a letter. [ABC News]


131 years

A message in a bottle cast off the side of a German ship on June 12, 1886, was found more than 131 years later in Australia. It’s the oldest known message in a bottle ever received. [The New York Times]


$1,635

Eat Clean Bro of Freehold, New Jersey, will cover the $1,635 Uber ride incurred by a New Jersey man who got drunk in West Virginia and accidentally called a car to bring him home. Eat Clean Bro’s founder said he wanted to commend the guy for not driving drunk. [Fox 5 Atlanta]


$86.3 million

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends the worst emails of all time, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found. (I’m paraphrasing.) Chock full of bait-and-switch tactics and constant freak-outs, the DCCC raked in $86.3 million from individual contributors from the beginning of 2017 through January 2018. That’s three times the amount raised from individual donors by the DCCC’s GOP counterparts. [Center for Public Integrity]


$5.6 billion

Profits recorded by Amazon in 2017. Still, the company paid $0 in federal taxes, thanks to a number of tax credits and breaks for stock options. Furthermore, Amazon will get an additional $789 million in benefits from the GOP tax bill. [The New Republic]


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