>>IME, the VFP community is pretty amazing in the treatment of women as equal partners. I'm sure that's partly because there have been visible female leaders in the community pretty much from day 1.

I immediately felt at home in the VFP Community having come from a profession where women not only are equal, they have come to dominate in many First World countries. Sometimes it seems not perfectly equal in medicine because so far men don't carry babies around for 9 months and not all prospective mothers want to be exposed to xray scatter in operating rooms for example or wrestle with a football player's dislocated shoulder close to term- but people do their best. As they do in VFP. The community luminaries I remember from the VFP2.x days are predominantly female. Certainly the capability and enthusiasm resonated across Compuserve ;-) and male colleagues also tended to be characters rather than dreary grey drones who congregate in boardrooms and can be overtly sexist IME.