The Comp Sci department at Chambana ( University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana for non-Midwesterners ) runs ChicTek (pronounced "sheek-tek") an effort to engage women in Computer Science. As part of this effort the department holds a week long retreat and Girls4Games competition. Teams of college girls design and write computer games for middle school and high school girls using GameMaker. Winners receive $1000 per team member and their schools Women Computer Science club gets another $1000 to boot.

Cornell University’s 'Green Eggs and Pan,' a Mario-style game where two players must cooperate to win took first place. University of California - Irvine's 'Eterative Tale' and North Central College's 'DummerUnfall' took second and third respectively. Details and downloads of the games can be found on the G4G Competition website.

There is a gender gap in both computer science and video games. Each industry is overwhelmingly male. Historically games are made by men for men. So of course men are the ones who gravitate towards the industry. I remember my freshman intro programming class way back when. It was something like 60 men and one or two women. This is gradually changing and efforts like G4G go a long way to closing the gap.

Some things do seem to attract certain genders more than others (cars, fashion, etc...), but yes, historically games have been very much geared towards guys, and bringing out more games attractive to female gamers seems like a good thing to me.

I used to program games for GameMaker. They sucked of course.