Silicon Sisters LogoSilicon Sisters is a women's game development company that is making games for women gamers.  Information about how they are going to accomplish this goal is scarce and mostly  present in today's video game industry media outlets. (ArsTechnica, IGN, Gamasutra) They want to create games that appeal to women without specifically excluding men.  The common perception is that the video game industry is dominated by male players and to an extent that is true but I'm not so sure that the statement holds nearly as much weight as it used to.  Regardless, every so often someone raises the notion that games can be created specifically for women and I don't buy it.  I don't believe you can specifically create video games for women without stereotyping women.  If blatant stereotyping is the goal then I'll reverse that statement and tell you that I think it is easy to create games for women.

A more interesting question is "Why do women not play certain games and why do they play others in droves?"  Solve that question as it applies to your specific game and I think women will naturally play your game.  There's a few statements in the linked articles that bother me.
  1. Women gamers need simpler controls.  Hogwash.  Women gamers may not have grown up playing the NES and then the Playstation but that does not mean they can't handle complex control pads.  It just means that they need to walk the learning curve like most men have had to do.  Neuter the statement and say "New gamers need simpler controls." and I'm ok with that statement.  The fact that these new gamers are also women gamers is not a correlated statistic.  Holding up simpler control schemes as catering to women is stereotyping women and sexist in and of itself.
  2. Women need to be more than simple eye candy.  This one I agree with and I happen to think that this one is the primary reasons why women do not play many games.  When you read a book or watch a movie, you want to identify with someone in the story.  Same is true when you play a video game.  Too often, women are portrayed in a blatantly sexist format and it is no surprise to me that games where women are represented respectfully in the story are played by women gamers.  In Silicon Sisters defense, they've stated that they are not interested in "pinkifying" games.  That's just as sexist as the big breasted scantily clad warrior.
Companies have been chasing the female gamer demographic for at least a decade.  While there have been games that were a hit with females, each game was not designed for women specifically.  The Sims is a simulation game.  It appeals to women because it doesn't objectify them.  My mother-in-law plays Tiger Woods golf.  It appeals to her because she's a golfer and the game doesn't objectify women, regardless of what the golfer on the cover does.  The old Xbox game, "Outlaw Golf", with it's stripper golfers and innuendos likewise didn't get any attention from her.  I was going to name a few more games here but aside from Grand Theft Auto, all RTS games and 99.9% of all FPS games, there's too many examples of games that women play in droves to think that the industry needs a company that represents women gamers with an all-women development staff. I think their goals are noble, a couple years too late and ultimately already in the process of being taken care of by the rest of the industry.  Farmville, many MMOs, every Facebook game and many Wii games are a testament to that statement.
 
Best of luck to Silicon Sisters and their new fledgling game company.  Honestly, I'd have produced a hit game first before trumpeting the company's goals and attracting the microscope it will bring to their first release.  What does it say if more men buy their first game?  How does this public relations nightmare not drive their game design towards ever more sexist design maxims?  We'll see.