Ladies section if the forums?

Hey everyone,
I am a married man with 6 females in my home! Lol Just kidding!! I love them all I am very much an outdoors person and try to share that with my family as well. I have one step son. I am very happy to see a lot of women getting into backpacking and other outdoor activities. ( or perhaps its just getting more attention I am not sure) I have always encouraged my girls in this way and now my step daughters as well. I am working on my wife as well. She hikes with me and will soon go on her first backpacking trip with me. I love sharing my passion for the outdoors with all the girls and stepson.

My point here though is I was wander if it would be a good idea for this sight to give the ladies a "ladies section" on the forum for discussion specific to them. Just an idea. What do you think good idea or not?

I doubt it (and I'm female). There is a section supposedly for women only on White Blaze (Appalachian Trail forum), and on any threads I've looked at there are more responses from men than from women. They might as well not bother--nothing is private on the internet. IMHO, if any men don't know about a few special issues that women face, it's high time they learned! (Vice versa, too!)

To other women here--what do you think?

As far as I can see, the differences of knowledge or opinions that really stand out are those between individual hikers, without reference to their sex. On the other hand, if you were to average out all men hikers and all women hikers and compare the results, they'd share about 99% in common in terms of hiking-related interests, problems, approaches and ideas.

I am aware that internet forums are notoriously dominated by men and often are seen as unwelcoming to women, so that having a women-specific forum might overcome that obstacle. However, my sense is that this website is extremely polite, our discussions are quite gentle, and we're very focused on being helpful to all comers, so that such a woman-specific forum would either attract very little traffic, or else replicate threads that already exist or fit comfortably in some other forum and would benefit from a wider participation than just our women forum members.

I hope we hear from other women here! Also, maybe you men could ask the females in your family?

Just because I don't see any need for a woman's section doesn't necessarily mean that other women here feel that way!

I agree with OM. Based on what I've seen on "the other" lightweight backpacking site, when a question comes up by and for women, it seems that more men than women just can't keep from weighing in either with their insight into "women's issues" or with wisecracks. Better just to leave things as they currently are, this site is very well-behaved and polite and shouldn't need a special "female" section.

Hey everyone,
You have made some very good points I didn't think about