Yellowknife (Feb 04/04) - The NWT Status of Women Council is offering another nudge of encouragement to women seeking leadership roles in the North.

Last Thursday, the new Women's Voices in Leadership web site -- the first of its kind in the NWT -- took its place in cyberspace.

The Web site will hopefully lead to more women taking charge, said Gerri Sharpe-Staples, council president and a member of the WVL committee.

"Our communities and our society as a whole will benefit if more women can bring their knowledge and experience to leadership and public decision-making," she said. "Currently, few women are at the tables where major public decisions are being made."

In the NWT legislative assembly, only two of the 19 members are women.

Both Sandy Lee and Jane Groenewegen are profiled on the site, along with other NWT women actively involved in leadership. The Web site also contains news on WVL workshops, different resources and links.

The launch of the Web site is the second phase of the WVL project -- in the works since 1998 -- said Barb Saunders, executive director of the Status of Women Council of the NWT.

"This is just a portion of it," she said.

Saunders said part of the first phase included a number of workshops in communities around the North, which provided much of the same information the Web site.

"It has been extremely successful," she said. "And now, with computers in most communities, it can be more accessible."

The division of the territory in 1999 had put the project into a hiatus, Saunders said.

"We had to just get everything worked out after that."