It's hard to imagine a sport more equal or better suited to women than diving, especially free diving. Whenever you read about a woman diver you hear talk about her challenging the "macho image" of Scuba or Free Diving or whatever. It's hard for us to see anything very "macho" about Scuba diving, frankly, but women have been diving for a lot longer than there have been breathing prostheses. Sponge divers in Greece, urchin divers in Korea, pearl divers in Japan have been women, in some cases exclusively women, for centuries. There is evidence that women are actually physiologically superior for diving: endurance of cold and greater sub-cutaneous fat layers, greater ability to hold breath in cold water. There are reasons that the Japanese pearl divers were always female--and those women were the world champions at breath-hold up until very recent times.

This page is to encourage women to dive. And to skip all the mechanical clutter and calculations of Scuba: just slide down into the water and be yourself. All the articles, links, and gallery presented on this page are for that goal--to model an activity in which women can express themselves and excel, and to signal out women who have done so.