Hey Shirish,

Been talking to lots of women about this - one barrier I'm finding from informal chats with many women in India who are otherwise comfy with the net is technical. At the first Mumbai meetup in Sept 2010, women who blog etc regularly said they found the editing interface much harder to use, so tried, then abandoned it.

At the Kolkata wiki 10 meetup in Jan 2011, a woman who had attended an earlier meetup requested a wiki workshop for a group of women - she wanted a separate workshop for women only so that women could really understand how to edit and work through the editing interface and ask basic questions without appearing stupid or ignorant. She felt constrained to ask these questions in the more technologically-sophisticated environment of the regular meetups.

Also, many women who are interested in editing are not necessarily willing to learn how to edit + related policies on their own.

So yes, helpers and guides would be great - as well as workshops both aimed specifically at women, and general workshops where we encourage more women to participate. (We don't want to lump women into a separate category necessarily, but if we really want to encourage more women to edit, we do need to address barriers *they* identify as well - so a mixed strategy would be great.)

Also, while we should, of course, continue to do workshops at IITs, VJTI and other technical institutes, there's already a gender gap at these institutes - where there are many more men than women. If we only look for women where there are largely men, we are unlikely to find them. So it would be good to look for IT or related departments at women's colleges such as SNDT etc too.

There are many other barriers, some general, some specific to women, as is being discussed on gendergap...just wanted to highlight this.

Cheers
Bishakha