Jill Miller Zimon is one of WCF’s MsRepresentation bloggers in the final weeks of the 2010 election.
According to the Women Give 2010 report, women are better providers than men – at least when it comes to providing donations to charity. From The Huffington Post:
“I think the general assumption is that women might be more likely to give, but that they give less money,” Mesch said.
That assumption is only half true, according to the analysis of data from a 2007 Center on Philanthropy study. Women gave more often than men and spread out their giving to different charities, but they also give more in total dollars, Mesch said.
Some of the reasons given for this difference include:
-The increase in the number of women who work
-Growth in women’s incomes, an increase in how many women have college degrees and therefore wield greater earning power
-More than one-quarter of working women make more money than their husbands
Unfortunately, women’s giving in the political sector, while improving, still lags behind that of men. In the fall of 2008, WCF Foundation released its report, Vote With Your Purse.
The research made the following conclusions:
-On all levels of political giving, women are outspent by men
-Women’s income has risen more than 60 percent in the last 30 years, but women represent only 27 percent of individual hard money contributions to candidates, party committees and PACs
-Women drive charitable giving but don’t associate political contributions with the social change of charitable contributions
A 2009 update of that study, which you can read here, found the gender gap in political contributions still present. From the update:
Women only contributed 31 percent of total donations to candidates, political action committees (PACs), and party committees during the 2008 election cycle, amounting to a 4 percent increase from the 2006 cycle. According to the report, female candidates raise less money than their male counterparts and women actually give nearly twice as much money to males as females.
Ack.
While we’re waiting for the 2010 season to wrap up and perhaps show improvements in these areas, the solution may be as simple as B-I-N-G-O. As reported by OpenSecrets.org in, “Be It Bingo or Activism, Some Women Buck Political Contribution Trends.”
Only three-tenths of a percent of voting-age Americans donate money to campaigns, and historically, men donate much larger sums than women. But a Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows that the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee is relying on women to raise a large part of its $7.7 million in campaign funds through political bingo. Pay up to $400 for a stack of bingo cards – which counts as a campaign contribution — and suddenly, you are part of the horse-race.
Nearly all the women playing political bingo report on federal forms as being “retired” or otherwise unemployed. Public records indicate many are 50 years old or older. And all of them made at least several donations of $200 or more to the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee. Similar-sized donations to county-level Democratic parties usually followed.
As the chart below reveals, the zip code with the highest proportion of political contributions from women versus men is in Washington State. See if your city or region is represented in this chart that shows the zip codes with more than 66 percent of women donating dollars:
So, as Debra J. Mesch, Ph.D., director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, implies, we may very soon see these contribution patterns expand as women come to understand that “…the power of their giving may encourage more women to consider the difference they can make with their giving.”
Here’s hoping that we can enlarge the sphere in which women see themselves making a difference to the political world.
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