Tom:
For a thread with a noble goal, your thought has descended to something lower pretty quickly. And that's one of the problems any female golf architect faces ... there is a lot of resistance built into the system, both on the construction level and among the potential clients.
(I wonder what Jack Nicklaus thinks about this? He says I don't play golf well enough to understand a golf shot, but I hit it as well as some women professionals ... so they must not understand either? Maybe it says something that Jack has established all of his sons as designers, even his son in law, but there are no women designers in his firm as far as I know.)
Anyway, the architect James B mentioned above, Line Mortensen, is a woman from Denmark now living in Gullane. She has designed a couple of new courses in Denmark, and I hope she gets to design more, because she clearly loves golf and loves the work -- and she understands what a golf shot is, too.
I had a young woman working for me for three years, Sara Mess, who's now gone back to school to get a Masters in Landscape Architecture. Unfortunately, I could never get her out in the field for long enough to figure out what she could do out there, but she was better at doing routing plans than anyone I've worked with before ... unfortunately for her, we just aren't so busy that I need someone besides myself to do them.
Part of the reason Sara quit was that she could see how difficult it would be to be on the road as much as the rest of the boys and have any kind of normal family life, which was important to her, too. (That may be why the traveling circus lifestyle of professional golf attracts a higher than normal percentage of gay women, but that's another subject altogether.) But, I'm sure part of the reason was that Sara could see how hard it would be to break through the barriers of a male-dominated profession and be respected by all of the parties one has to deal with. Line Mortensen has managed to do this, albeit in a small country like Denmark where she was highly regarded as a golfer to start with.
So far all of the women who have succeeded in golf architecture in the USA have been part of larger firms where they can just go out and do the work, knowing they have backup from their bosses, and without having to establish themselves as someone who can attract business.
So, on one level I agree with Tony -- it shouldn't be about gender. Yet, there are so few women at any level in the business that it's clear it HAS been about gender for many years, and I hope that's a trend that can be reversed. There are a lot of women golfers, so there should be some female golf architects.