ornoth | Giving Women… A Hard Time

I recently read this article which cites a study by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University that reported finding a significant gender bias in philanthropic giving.

Actually, the article’s tone was a little more strident than that, loudly proclaiming that “Women are the conduit for change on the planet,” and backing that claim up with further observations that “Women across nearly every income level gave significantly more to charity than men, nearly twice as much in some cases,” and “Women gave more often than men and […] they also give more in total dollars.”

Now although I care about sexism, I’m also sensitive to reverse sexism, and this article raised my hackles from the start. Even if there is a statistically significant difference in philanthropy by gender, what is the value of reporting it in this manner, other than to reinforce tired stereotypes of women as nurturers and men as competitive and selfish? Gee, that’s progressive!

Of course, my indignation wouldn’t have justified a blog post were the issues of gender and philanthropy not personal, exacerbated by my predilection for numerical analysis. So…

As you well know, I’ve spent the last ten years fundraising for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and off the top of my head I hadn’t noticed any gender bias (one way or the other) in the donations I’ve received.

But that got my curiosity up, so I went and ran the numbers. While I can’t speak for national trends, here’s my real-world results.

First, I looked at the gender breakdown of the people who have sponsored my Pan-Mass Challenge ride since 2001, throwing out four donations that explicitly came from couples. I came up with 105 women and 134 men.

Contrary to the study’s findings, I have 30 percent more male sponsors than female. Huh. Interesting.

Second, I looked not just at people, but at the total number of donations they made. Although I had fewer female sponsors, perhaps they actually donated more frequently.

No, that wasn’t the case either. I have received a total of 226 donations from women, and 339 from men.

Again bucking the study’s findings, the men who sponsor me have given 50 percent more donations than the women. Wow! I hadn’t noticed that.

My third measurement was designed to account for any possible gender bias in the makeup of my donor list. After all, I am a guy, and I might have a proportionally larger number of guy friends, right?

So I divided the number of donations by the number of people making them, which told me the average number of donations made per person. If that article was right, surely the average lady would donate more frequently than the average man.

No. As a group, the women who have sponsored me have done so an average of 2.15 times, while the guys have averaged 2.53 donations per person.

That did close the gap a bit, but the men have still made 20 percent more donations per person than the women.

Nothing I’ve described so far validates the article’s claims. In fact (and to my surprise), it’s actually the opposite; if we go by number of donations, the men have been 20 to 50 percent more forthcoming in support of my PMC ride than the ladies.

Surely that can’t be right, tho. Let’s look further…

So far I’ve only focused on how many donations people made. Remember that the article also claimed that women give significantly more (dollar-wise) to charity than men, sometimes twice as much. Okay, let’s start looking at my numbers in terms of dollars and (perhaps) sense.

Chart number four shows how much money I have received from each group. Note that I have explicitly excluded all funds received from anyone’s employer matching gift programs; this is purely individual donations.

Again, the boys have the edge, contributing nearly $32,000, while the women account for only $16,000.

Yes, those numbers are correct. While the study claims that women often donate twice as much to charity as men, over the past decade they’ve only given half as much as the men gave to my Pan-Mass Challenge ride.

In this case, the article’s assessment that “women are the conduit for change on the planet” must be reversed, because my male friends have given twice as much as women in the effort to stop cancer.

Again, since there are more men in my sample than women, we have to correct for that. This chart shows what happens when we look at those numbers on a per capita basis.

As you can see, each woman who has sponsored me has given, on average, $155. That’s not per donation; that’s each person’s sum total of all their donations since 2001. At the same time, each man has given, on average, $237.

So extrapolating all that out, over ten years the average male sponsor has given me $80 more than the average female sponsor. It’s not twice as much as his female counterpart gave, but it’s still over 50 percent more.

Finally, let’s forget the ten-year tally and boil it down to one final number. Just how big is the average donation? Girls versus boys!

Sorry, girls. The trend still holds true.

The average donation I receive from a woman is $72.25, while the average donation from a man… $93.65.

On average, every donation I get from a man is 20 dollars more than what I would get from a woman. In the final tally, men have given me 30 percent larger donations than women.

Of course, those are just averages, and there are tons of people of both genders who give much more or much less. The point isn’t to make anyone feel self-conscious about how much they give. I’m not challenging anyone or any group of people to increase their giving. I’m just describing how things have gone down, because I was curious and maybe you are, too.

I’d actually also be interested to hear what others’ fundraising stats are like. More is always better when it comes to data!

To summarize all that: the analysis of my Pan-Mass Challenge fundraising shows that I have 30 percent more male sponsors. As a group they have made 50 percent more donations, and they average 20 percent more donations per person than women. Men have given twice as much total money as women, 50 percent more money per person, and their average donation size is 30 percent larger than those given by women. It’s a surprising result, made doubly so by how consistently the results reinforce one another.

All this is starkly contradicts the conclusions in the news article I first mentioned.

Even if it doesn’t jibe with my firsthand experience, it’s still possible that the study behind that article was done with scientific rigor and its claims are valid.

On the other hand, the news article was written by a woman reporter, quoting the woman director of a woman’s philanthropy institute that, together with a women’s advocacy organization (Fenton), conducted a gender-based study whose conclusion (unsurprisingly) made women look better than men and depicted women as “the conduit of change on the planet”. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for objectivity to me.

That degree of built-in gender bias in the underlying study’s genesis, sponsorship, execution, conclusions, and reporting really bring its validity and its conclusions into question.

But who knows? Maybe women do give more money to charity more often than men. But it won’t be proven by this study conducted by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute.