Women.com Is A Place Where Women Can Engage In Real Talk Online — No Men Allowed

From middle school girls' sleepovers to more codified groups like the "Ladies' Four O'Clock Club," women have known for ages that there's something special about the conversational dynamic that happens when a group of females get together. When women are with other women that they trust, they often can be completely honest and comfortable in a way that they may not be in more mixed company.

A website called Women.com aims to be the go-to place where women can speak honestly with each other online, deliberately away from the male gender — a sort of Ladies Four O'Clock Club for the online world. The bootstrapped startup, which is co-founded by CEO Susan Johnson and CTO Neal Kemp, is launching this week out of the current class of Y Combinator.

Although there are a lot of sites aimed at female audiences that already have strong commenting communities — Jezebel, XoJane, iVillage, the BlogHer network, just to name a few — Women.com aims to stand apart in a few key ways. For one, there is no editorial voice steering the conversation: Topics are user-submitted, making the site a pure community, more like a Reddit or a Metafilter. Secondly, Women.com is more strict than other sites about being only for females, as men are forbidden from logging in to access the site's content. The gender exclusion is maintained at the moment by the site being invite-only, something that the site's users take seriously (investor Jason Calacanis received a good amount of backlash when he requested an invitation to Women.com on Twitter). If it becomes apparent that a male has accessed the site, that account is banned. In the future when Women.com launches out of beta, the company plans to verify its users' gender by using Facebook Connect.

In an interview earlier this month, Women.com CEO and co-founder Susan Johnson told me that she first thought about the potential for creating a safe place online where women can learn from each other and share their experiences and opinions in her college years, when she worked on developing a website called "Savvy Girl." The concept was put on the back burner, though, as she went on to build a career post-college in marketing for entertainment and digital media firms. But in her most recent corporate role as a marketing executive at Facebook, she realized that her initial dream of a female-only site could still have legs.

By techcrunch.