I wouldn’t call the inclusions from male members counter-productive. In fact, some really good questions/suggestions came from them. For instance, how do you police membership? If a male decides to get in, he just registers with a female nickname and you might never discover his real identitity. So technically you can’t limit it to to females only. Even if you decide to check members by videochats, for example, it’s not that difficult to find a female to pose as him, and again, you can’t stop him.
Aside from the technical limitations, since males are part of the problem and the solution, let’s give them the right to explain their point of view. From what I’ve seen, quite a lot of males are open to discussion and their point of view isn’t hard-coded. As I mentioned in my previous post (about my male colleague, who wouldn’t even hear a female to reinstall his computer), a man with a brain can be convinced that there is more to what he has personally seen so far.
"Until you have personally participated in an all women group trying to support and encourage women in our industry and have first hand experience of what went well and what did not, instead of telling her that her approach is wrong, "
Formally, I am not sure if I’m eligible to be a member. It all depends on how Web Developer is defined in this case. If it is somebody who codes full-time, I’m not in. When I said I am not a developer, I meant I don’t do this for a living (and hope I will never have to simply because I might be not so bad at it but there are a gazillion of things I am much better at and I’d rather do them than write bugs - even without me, there is no shortage of bug writers, male or female 
:)).
I do some WordPress design and occasionally coding, and in the past I’ve used other programming languages, too, but technically I do not qualify myself as a developer. In fact, I might be a very bad example because even though I am not a total failure as a programmer - as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen much worse than me, male and female, I chose to go in other IT areas - Web development and otherwise, technical and more business-oriented. Probably many other females made the same choice - they can code more or less decently but they’d rather do other stuff.
In a sense, similarly to Noppy and some of the other posters before me, I’ve adopted a sort of a unisex/gender-neutral approach. When the environment is friendly, this works for me. In those cases, when I personally have had problems because of my gender, usually it was with people who had different kinds of issues, how to say. And the sad thing is that (as a percentage) I had more problems with females than with males. I mean, let’s say I’ve worked with 20 females so far. I had problems with like 4 or 5 of them - or 20-25%. I’ve worked with hundreds of males - simply because there are more of them - let’s say 200 and I had problems with probably 10-15 males at most, which is 5-7.5%, i.e. in absolute numbers much higher but at the same time, times lower than the problem ratio with my own gender.
I had problems with people with issues - like female co-workers who were very unhappy in their personal life and hated me simply because I wasn’t in the same boat, or that I was a better coder than them, having in mind I am not a coder, etc. Or guys who were not men enough to admit that a woman can be better than them at tech - maybe not as a whole, but at least in a particular situation. With everybody else, regardless their gender, it was a pleasure to work.
As for being supportive to each other, it depends on what you need to support. For instance, how would you react in a situation where one female developer is sleeping with her boss and is getting quite a favorable treatment because of this, like pay raises, no work (the other developers in the team were doing her part of the work while she was way too busy to chat, browse online, think of the next mean trick to play on her colleagues, etc.) and so on? In one of my previous jobs we had this. Formally company rules didn’t ban this. Do you support this or not?
Not to keep you tense, I will tell you how it went. Some of the other female developers envied her. Some of the male colleagues didn’t see anything wrong - when you go up the company ladder, chicks are part of the package. Those of us, both male and female, who dared to voice our resentment, one by one had to leave the company because we became the targets of her malice and dirty tricks and the Bigger Boss accused us of being jealous, being not-cooperative, not team players, troublemakers and all the other bla-bla-bla, so we basically had to leave because our lives there became way too impossible. Do we really need to encourage more female developers like her to join development because there is shortage of women? 
Or another case. One of the girls whom I directed towards design, had to quit her first (and unfortunately) only job in design because of that bitch of a boss she had. The boss was really incompetent at design, was changing the tasks all the time and 10 minutes later demanded to get them done, was screaming profanities at the girl, was even insulting her about her looks and intelligence. The girl stood this for a month or so and quite naturally quit.
I tried to tell her that it’s not always that bad but honestly, at entry level you don’t have that much choice and the possibility of landing another low-paid and high-stress job wasn’t just hypothetic. I suggested to her to go freelance but she was still a beginner and didn’t have the confidence she would make it on her own. Later that year she enrolled back at school in a totally different area and is done with IT (most likely) forever. I agree, it was really a rough start and if she didn’t have other options, she would wipe her tears and go back to the office but since she had quite a lot of other choices, she simply didn’t have to stand all this.
I’m definitely not saying it’s always that bad. I’m just giving some examples from what I’ve seem/heard.
I don’t believe such things can happen at the Association - if not for something else, you go there voluntarily, it’s not a job you have to stand, so in this aspect even if it is female-only, I am almost 100 per cent certain it can’t possibly go that dirty but since you mentioned women supporting each other in IT, I decided to throw a couple of quick examples.
Finally, if I’m eligible to participate, I might get involved with the forums. I can’t promise it will be on a regular basis but even now and then, when I have what to say, I will do it.
