If you visit http://debian.org, You can see there is debian women project.It is designed to encourage feamle candidates to help open source community.on this same concept many other organisation also started to open such project.Let's take closer example of Gnome.

Many members of gnome think that there should be one gnome womens project.I dont know how much women surf arround the internet,How much they use computers,If they are developers.But there is no need for such project,Women must work with all mens,kids,teens on open source project,instaed of working seperatley.

I know very few womens are into website designing.i remember during 99-2000 i was in touch with girl who was updating episode guide for program"X-files".Also i know a women who was writing episode guide for cartoon network's show.After that i never come in touch with any webmaster female.I have't seen any girl arround here.If there is one,we should look at her design work and must encourage her.atleast that much we can do.Yes i agree http://www.flashgodess.com features female flash artists every month.I m not saying there are less girls who knows computer but female developer,webmasters are less in number in any such comunity.If that is not the case then why such communities making such projects?

Anyway,Opening This project thing proves that very few womens are into developing software.This is sad state of open source world.If this is the case then i m really happy that such projects will make difference.tell me waht you think about this.

Ooooo.... I can see some of our female members would like to stomp you down!

I can name at least dozen female members of TRAP17 I know that their design would kick your big mouth inside and out. They will remain nameless from me.

But the whole nutshell of this is that women are much more interesting creatures than men. Men are inclined to stay in one position or one area and wouldn't mind working on a project, building, thinking, eating or sleeping. Women on the other hand are inclined to move around, see other things, start a new project and love to see multiple projects at once. It's like saying, 'men can't listen to his wife and watch TV at the same time.' Men are one-centric minded creatures. Women are better at multi-tasking. UCLA devoted a study that a woman can listen to 5 different conversations and comprehend them all, where as a man had hard time understanding even 2 conversations at the same time.

Computers and computer related may be fun and exciting to men, but for women it's too confining and isolating. It is NOT that women cannot excel in web-designing but, they prefer to spend their massive crunching hours elsewhere... Science may be dominated by men but the world of Art belongs to women--quote by me.

well, even though web design is very related to computer programming... well, its also very different. I'm sure there are lots (and lots) of women who do web design. Programming stuff like Debian and GNOME is different. there is, I am sure a shortage of women in this field. as there is also a shortage of women Engineers &c. So there are always programs that try to enourage women to do these kinds of work. and rightly so, because women's minds do very often work differently than men's. as programming is very logical, and intuitive, having a different kind of mind or perspective would be very vaulable to a project. so... yeah, women should be encouraged to participate in programming projects.