Philanthropic funding for organizations devoted to ladies and ladies has constantly remained beneath two % of complete charitable giving since 2012, the yr for which the Girls’s Philanthropy Institute (WPI) on the Indiana College Lilly Household College of Philanthropy started monitoring this information. From healthcare and human rights to training and financial empowerment, these organizations assist handle a variety of points vital to advancing gender equality. By gaining a clearer understanding of the philanthropic panorama of assist for ladies and ladies, the nonprofit sector could make extra strategic, data-informed choices to shut this funding hole.
WPI not too long ago launched its sixth annual Girls & Women Index, a complete measurement of charitable giving to ladies’s and ladies’ organizations that reveals developments, alternatives, and challenges for funders dedicated to those causes. These findings, mixed with the elevated visibility afforded to ladies’s philanthropy pushed by influential philanthropists like Melinda French Gates or MacKenzie Scott and consciousness initiatives like Give to Girls and Women Day, display how analysis can impress better giving for ladies and ladies.
Insights from the 2024 Girls & Women Index
The 2024 Girls & Women Index supplies a decade-long dataset on charitable giving to U.S. organizations serving ladies and ladies, overlaying the years 2012 to 2021. Key findings from this yr’s Girls & Women index embrace:
- Giving to ladies and ladies reached a historic milestone. For the primary time, ladies’s and ladies’ organizations surpassed the $10 billion mark, receiving $10.2 billion in philanthropic assist in 2021. Whereas that is encouraging, giving to those causes represents simply 1.9 % of complete charitable giving — underscoring the necessity to assist a variety of organizations devoted to ladies and ladies, which is usually a highly effective nexus for change. For instance, nonprofits working to shut the gender pay hole are serving to to make sure ladies have equal entry to honest wages and profession alternatives. Organizations targeted on fixing for gendered well being disparities are enhancing entry to care for ladies and ladies. Moreover, nonprofits addressing household and intimate associate violence present vital assist companies, akin to shelters or authorized advocacy.
- Lengthy-term developments emerge in organizations’ mission focus areas. Reproductive well being and household planning organizations (e.g., Deliberate Parenthood, Heart for Reproductive Rights) maintained the biggest share of philanthropic assist for ladies’s and ladies’ causes in 2021, receiving $1.8 billion — a pattern that has been constant over time. Human companies (e.g., YWCA) and household and gender-based violence organizations (e.g., Nationwide Community to Finish Home Violence) adopted intently, every receiving $1.6 billion in 2021. Civil rights and advocacy organizations (e.g., Nationwide Girls’s Legislation Heart) noticed the biggest progress, with a 60.9 % enhance in philanthropic assist from 2020 to 2021. Funding for these advocacy organizations has greater than doubled over the last decade 2012-2021.
- Elevated funding from the general public sector. Authorities grants will be an necessary supply of earnings for a lot of charitable organizations, together with people who serve ladies and ladies. From 2020 to 2021, authorities grants to ladies’s and ladies’ organizations grew by 26.5 %, outpacing the expansion of such grants to different nonprofits and highlighting growing public sector funding in these causes. Nonetheless, over the last decade 2012-2021, authorities grants to Girls & Women Index organizations and to different organizations grew at almost the identical total charge.
The Girls & Women Index’s decade-long dataset presents a broader context for understanding the evolution of giving to ladies’s and ladies’ organizations. Whereas these teams have seen progress in charitable {dollars}, they nonetheless lag behind different sectors like human companies and training. The information reveals no metric — whether or not philanthropic assist, belongings, revenues, or bills — the place ladies’s and ladies’ organizations constantly outpaced non-gender-focused organizations during the last decade. Girls’s and ladies’ organizations are integral to each nonprofit sector, and lots of organizations, even when not solely targeted on ladies and ladies, incorporate gender equality of their work. So, rising funding for ladies’s and ladies’ organizations can go hand in hand with total progress in philanthropy.
The Position of Knowledge-Knowledgeable Philanthropy
These insights function a priceless useful resource for donors, fundraisers, and advocates devoted to advancing ladies’s and ladies’ causes. Importantly, we all know that this analysis is usually a highly effective motivator for donors.
As an illustration, the 2023 Financial institution of America Examine of Philanthropy, Charitable Giving by Prosperous Households, developed in collaboration with the Indiana College Lilly Household College of Philanthropy, examines the giving patterns, priorities, and attitudes of prosperous U.S. households for the yr 2022. When requested about their motivation for supporting ladies’s and ladies’ causes, 8.2 % of high-net-worth donors cited studying that these causes obtain lower than two % of complete charitable giving.
This precept — turning information into motion — is exemplified by daring management like that of French Gates, whose $250 million dedication to international ladies’s well being, part of her $1 billion dedication to ladies and ladies broadly, is a name to motion for funders world wide. French Gates’ vital funding, guided by information and recognizing ladies and ladies as an necessary nexus for change, demonstrates how high-profile donors can encourage others. By drawing consideration to the stark funding disparities and demonstrating the daring management wanted to deal with them, French Gates can affect different donors to acknowledge the urgency of investing in ladies and ladies.
Whereas the management of notable ladies philanthropists like French Gates, Scott, and Sheryl Sandberg is inspiring, sustained progress in funding for ladies and ladies will rely on widespread dedication and motion from everybody dedicated to gender equality. Knowledge alone can not drive change; funders, donors, and philanthropic establishments should act deliberately — leveraging analysis to align their giving methods with the wants of girls’s and ladies’ organizations.
The philanthropic sector has a possibility to extra successfully interact communities to assist translate analysis into significant motion. In response to this lack of funding for ladies’s and ladies’ organizations, WPI launched Give to Girls and Women Day, which takes place yearly on October 11, coinciding with the Worldwide Day of the Lady. Companions on this nationwide initiative purpose to boost consciousness across the funding disparity and develop philanthropic assist for ladies and ladies. Now in its third yr, the initiative’s success in amplifying this dialog is mirrored within the rising assist of main philanthropic organizations akin to GivingTuesday, Pivotal Ventures, Ms. Basis, Girls Shifting Thousands and thousands, and extra.
Moreover, we’ve seen organizations faucet into this second to deepen their dedication to ladies and ladies or use it as a possibility for fundraising, driving very important assist to their women- and girls-focused causes.
For instance, impressed by this information, Amplify Her Basis launched on Give to Girls and Women Day and the Worldwide Day of the Lady in 2023 with a devoted give attention to serving to shut the giving hole by directing one hundred pc of its grantmaking to ladies’s and ladies’ organizations in New York Metropolis.
This yr, the Girls’s Philanthropy Institute was excited to associate with Amplify Her Basis to host a robust Give to Girls and Women Day occasion that introduced collectively philanthropists, nonprofits, company allies, and gender equality advocates nearly and in New York Metropolis. The occasion resulted in greater than $1.4 million raised for ladies and ladies as of December 2024.
Knowledge alone received’t resolve the funding hole for ladies and ladies, however it could actually function a robust signpost and gear to information philanthropy towards elevated impression. Supporting ladies’s and ladies’ organizations can complement and improve current funding methods. Irrespective of your focus, integrating a gender lens into your giving strategy can drive significant progress throughout all areas of curiosity. Collectively, donors and funders who’re keen about supporting ladies and ladies can be certain that the organizations serving them obtain the assets they should thrive.
Jacqueline Ackerman is interim director of the Girls’s Philanthropy Institute on the Indiana College Lilly Household College of Philanthropy.
Editor’s Word: CEP publishes a spread of views. The views expressed listed here are these of the authors, not essentially these of CEP.
