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There are professions with fewer women --...

Yes, there are such "professions":
Free/libre/open source software community members: 1.5% women!

Tons of economic research on ((dis)advantages) of use of FLOSS and Open Standards in government has been conducted by UNU MERIT in their FLOSS: Policy Support programme.

Besides that, depending on your audience and/or the specific IT portfolio you're addressing, cost might not be a strong argument, and it's certainly not the only one. Perhaps you also need to identify more intrinsic benefits such as government transparancy and "digital durability".

There have been plenty of studies, but apparently most people aren't really aware of them.

Two big factors:

1. Our culture stereotypes women as poor at math and technical subjects. This actually causes many women to perform more poorly than men in math and technical subjects.
2. For those who are confident of their abilities, many find aspects of the male-dominated tech culture distasteful, especially on OSS projects.

For number one, see Stereotype threat, and regarding women, specifically Stereotype Threat and Women's Math Performance. In that paper, they took a standard engineering aptitude exam and randomly chose some questions. Then they took sample populations of men and women, and told them different things about the test. One group they told that the test was an aptitude predictor; another they told that they were just helping to test the test itself; another were told specifically that the test had been designed to be gender-neutral. What they found was that women did significantly worse than men when they thought it was an aptitude test; and they did best when they were told that it was gender-neutural, even though the questions were exactly the same.

For number two, see some of the findings from the FLOSS Gender Integrated Report of Findings. One of the findings was that in many OSS projects, reputation is built by "flaming". This is off-putting to a lot of people, but especially to women. One of the stories in the report is from a woman developer on the Debian project, who after rebuking a younger person for making a joke about rape, was told "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Obviously there are some women willing to put up with this crap, but there are probably a ton of women who could excel in OSS, but never get involved or leave because of the culture.

The solution? To number one, probably just more widespread information.

Number two is harder -- it involves, in part, men changing their culture. Men and women are different, and that difference is valuable; so if men want more women in tech, they're going to have to change the way they operate.

...And it influenced the GNOME project to open the Women Summer Outreach program and so on...

It was a report commissioned by the European Union of all things. Have you every checked out the FLOSS Policy Support page?
http://flosspols.org/

Very interesting stuff.

And here's the article on their on gender findings:
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Ge nder_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

Along with their recommendations...
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Ge nder_Policy_Recommendations.pdf

A bit dry perhaps, but still a very interesting, and informative, read full of thorough investigation and professionally collected statistics.

...And it influenced the GNOME project to open the Women Summer Outreach program and so on...

It was a report commissioned by the European Union of all things. Have you every checked out the FLOSS Policy Support page?
http://flosspols.org/

Very interesting stuff.

And here's the article on their on gender findings:
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Ge nder_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

Along with their recommendations...
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Ge nder_Policy_Recommendations.pdf

A bit dry perhaps, but still a very interesting, and informative, read full of thorough investigation and professionally collected statistics.

...And it influenced the GNOME project to open the Women Summer Outreach program and so on...

It was a report commissioned by the European Union of all things. Have you every checked out the FLOSS Policy Support page?
http://flosspols.org/

Very interesting stuff.

And here's the article on their on gender findings:
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Ge nder_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf

Along with their recommendations...
http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Ge nder_Policy_Recommendations.pdf

A bit dry perhaps, but still a very interesting, and informative, read full of thorough investigation and professionally collected statistics.

Parent post has a good point.

If you are crying "Unfair!" about how it's not fair to have compensatory "reverse discrimination" or "affirmative action" because men and women should be on an equal footing, you don't get it.

You can debate about whether this is fair in the job search market, but that's a completely different debate, because that's a zero-sum situation: if a company hires a woman due to "affirmative action", then by definition they have rejected a man applicant. That's not what's happening here.

Women's outreach projects like Fedora Women, LinuxChix, etc. are taking advantage of an untapped population. Drawing more women into the FL/OSS community is *not* a loss for men; in fact, it is a gain for everyone. Why the big uproar?

Now, it so happens that the way in which we realized there was an untapped population was because of the low ratio of women to men, but this is merely an indicator. The goal of these projects is *not* to "fix the ratio", which would have implied that we would be equally happy reducing the number of men. Rather, we use the indicator to tell us where we can focus our outreach efforts. We see that there are reasons why women are being systematically and subconsciously being discriminated against (see the FLOSSPOLS report http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D1 6-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf --it's a PDF file). So we want to fix the problem, partially by increase awareness.

What if we had replaced "women" with some other population with great potential for contribution --say, "non-English-speaking programmers"-- would people complain that the effort to involve all of the international community would be unfair to the English speakers? I can just imagine the outcry:

"There are already some non-English-speaking programmers on one of the Sourceforge projects."
"Why are we trying to get them involved in FL/OSS? That means fewer resources to promote FL/OSS to English speakers!"
"Who's stopping them from learning English? Face it --they're just not interested."
"FL/OSS is doing okay with just English-speakers only. I don't see any problem."
"We shouldn't help them, because they're rude --I emailed them about some bugs in their program, but they never even acknowledged my email."
"Hey! You English no good! Okay? Me teach you program: HELLO WORLD! Yes?"

Guys, let's pull our collective head out of our ass and stop giving knee-jerk reactions just because the Google keywords "affirmative action" showed up somewhere in this threat.

Do a Google on "Cutter" and "Orwell school" - they've been smart because for some apps you need Windows - all the rest is done via Terminal Servers (note to OpenOffice: why is your memory footprint so much larger than StarOffice?).

The Ubuntu lot have a link into the SchoolTool efforts of Mark Shuttleworth, and anyone who's followed the FLOSS in Government trails will know about the fantastic work that has taken place in the Extramadura region in Spain. Link to all the presentations.

There is far, far more happening out there than the UK Government seems to know - I wonder when they finally try and spend some money efficiently and emulate what the Spanish did. Could be a new concept: actual *efficient* use of tax money...

Do a Google on "Cutter" and "Orwell school" - they've been smart because for some apps you need Windows - all the rest is done via Terminal Servers (note to OpenOffice: why is your memory footprint so much larger than StarOffice?).

The Ubuntu lot have a link into the SchoolTool efforts of Mark Shuttleworth, and anyone who's followed the FLOSS in Government trails will know about the fantastic work that has taken place in the Extramadura region in Spain. Link to all the presentations.

There is far, far more happening out there than the UK Government seems to know - I wonder when they finally try and spend some money efficiently and emulate what the Spanish did. Could be a new concept: actual *efficient* use of tax money...

There is a lot of support for OSS in Europe, mainly in EU institutions built up in and around Maastricht.
The idea is to create a lot of research centers, not only in tech related issues but in the study of the economics and political impact of OSS as well.
In addition to that, a lot of EU countries, particularly France, Germany, and some parts of Spain are taking big steps towards goverment support for OSS. Schools in Spain are to migrate to linux in 18 months, and there is talk about doing the same in France. France runs quite a bit of its critical infrastructure (computer administrated motorways, nuclear power plants, airport traffic control, etc) on hardened linux systems.
Take a look at the following links if your interested:

http://www.flosspols.org/ http://www.flossproject.org/

any european folk interested by this subject should come to TheHague on nov the 18th to attend FlossPols :

take a look at the speakers list to get an idea of how "high-level" this event can be.

representatives from the European Union, the IDA (the organism from the EU responsible for an excellent "opensource migration guidelines" report), and from various state-ministries from all around europe will gather there around "FLOSS in government", giving concrete experience-returns and precious advise i think...

any european folk interested by this subject should come to TheHague on nov the 18th to attend FlossPols :

take a look at the speakers list to get an idea of how "high-level" this event can be.

representatives from the European Union, the IDA (the organism from the EU responsible for an excellent "opensource migration guidelines" report), and from various state-ministries from all around europe will gather there around "FLOSS in government", giving concrete experience-returns and precious advise i think...