Disagree.
The NYT site didn't make it easy, but I just browsed about 12 months worth of this column(?) "Preoccupations."
Female and male profiles were about 50-50, and everybody else seemed pretty average looking.
Less than half the time is it a profile of an individual, the rest of the time it's a profile of a "trend" (This Hashrocket pair programming article that was on HN a while back, is from this same NYT column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/jobs/20pre.html?)
All the rest of the profiles were equally as interesting-but-not-mind-blowing. (Though I'm less critical than you about the slow-news-day part. That's "slice of life" journalism. It's always like that, heh. In that regard, every day is a slow news day. )
I suggest a study: One where when a post's author/subject is a female, we count how frequently her appearance is brought up when it's not otherwise the topic of the post, versus when it's an average looking guy posting about how he organizes his email folders/ moved to git/ almost took VC.
Does that stuff get called a slow news day?