The latest Women & Girls Index, an analysis of data by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute (WPI) at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, includes two numbers that together paint a dire picture of the state of support for organizations centered on the needs of girls and women.
Only roughly 3.5% of registered charitable organizations in the United States focus on serving women or girls. And those organizations, collectively, received just 1.9% of contributions from all nongovernmental sources in 2019.
To put it another way: When it comes to giving priorities in the U.S., women and girls are dead last.
Religious nonprofits received over 15 times more. Other types of organizations, including foundations and nonprofits focused on general health, international affairs and arts and culture, also received vastly more. Groups focused on the environment and animals received nearly double the amount dedicated to women and girls.
Worse, the minuscule percentage given to women and girls’ organizations hasn’t changed since 2012, the first year covered by the index (WPI’s first release of the index was in 2019). Sure, different causes have gained and lost support within the women and girls umbrella during that time. But even social upheavals like the #MeToo movement, and severe attacks on women and women’s rights, from 2016 campaign rhetoric to the ongoing backsliding on abortion rights, haven’t resulted in a higher percentage of giving to women and girls overall.
Fortunately, there are needles of good news within this thoroughly depressing haystack. Current events have spurred donors to put more money behind causes like reproductive health and pay equity, while collective giving for women and girls through giving circles and other avenues is growing steadily. The Women’s Philanthropy Institute is also making direct efforts to help nonprofits that serve women and girls increase their percentage of the collective bottom line.
What counts as funding for women and girls?
Before compiling and releasing the data for the first index in 2019, the first job WPI researchers faced was determining the criteria for inclusion. “A ‘women and girls’ organization, to our knowledge, had not been defined before then,” said WPI Research Associate Tessa Skidmore. The researchers chose to focus on two types of nonprofit groups. The first and most obvious category is organizations dedicated primarily to serving women and/or girls, like Planned Parenthood or Girls, Inc. The second, which the researchers call “collectives,” are voluntary organizations of women and girls who have come together to serve philanthropic causes, like Junior Leagues.
Once they defined their criteria, the researchers developed a list of key words and phrases associated with women and girls’ issues and ran that list through available databases of IRS 990 forms and publications, including program descriptions and mission statements, fine-tuning their search terms as they went. The result is a compilation of almost all giving to 501(c)(3) nonprofits for women and girls from individuals, corporations and foundations. Advocacy organizations incorporated as 501(c)(4)s aren’t included; neither are some of the groups that are too small to file 990s.
While the index is comprehensive in that it tracks most sources of giving, it does have one glaring flaw: It doesn’t include demographic breakdowns according to categories like race, disability or sexual orientation. Skidmore said the information WPI’s researchers relied on also doesn’t break down those intersectional identities.
Fortunately, a solution may be in the works. According to WPI Associate Director Jacquie Ackerman, outside funders have shown interest in the index as a model for looking at other areas of inclusive philanthropy. Ackerman said that in time, the creation of similar indexes for other marginalized communities may allow WPI to find the “overlap” between organizations in the different indexes and thus compile better data on giving to more diverse organizations dedicated to women and girls. “We’re very aware that that’s a shortcoming of the data, and we’re working on it,” Ackerman said.
In addition, Ackerman said it’s important to note that just because only 1.9% of charitable giving is going to women-and-girls-specific organizations, “that doesn’t mean that 98% is going to men and boys. It means that the vast majority of philanthropy is probably dedicated to a cause that may serve men or women, boys or girls,” like Boys and Girls Clubs, for instance.
Still, she said, “any way you slice and dice the data, it’s a bleak picture for women’s and girls’ causes.”
That bleak picture, though, isn’t necessarily the result of donors making an active choice not to give to groups focused on women and girls. High-net-worth individuals and foundations aside, Ackerman said, “most people give to organizations that ask them to give or because an issue is in front of them,” like the war in Ukraine or a natural disaster. “Most people do not sit down regularly and say, ‘Here are my values, here are the organizations I support, and here’s how those things line up.’”
A lack of awareness may be a big factor in the disparity in giving to women and girls’ causes, she said. And now that WPI has hit its stride in its ability to compile the giving data, the organization is working to help nonprofits serving women and girls spread the word.
Some good news — and a new giving day dedicated to women and girls
Despite the overall depressing picture, the index does have some good news. The first of those happy data points is the fact that reproductive health and family planning received the largest share of women and girls’ funding in 2019, with $1.5 billion moved to this area. Further, while the overall percentage of money given to women and girls stayed roughly the same from 2012 through 2019, giving for reproductive health and family planning increased by 82.3% during the same time, long before both the 2016 election and the Dobbs decision.
Reproductive health isn’t the only area of women and girls’ giving that has benefited from current events. As a rule, organizations dedicated to gender equality and employment organizations like the National Women’s Law Center receive a relatively small portion of the money moved to women and girls’ causes. But possibly thanks to cultural events like #MeToo and the unequal pay issues highlighted by the U.S. women’s soccer team’s 2019 World Cup victory, giving to these organizations increased by over 100% from 2012 through 2019, with an 11.8% increase from 2018 to 2019 alone.
And while civil society may be crashing and burning in other areas, the rise and success of women’s giving collectives is another promising development. According to the index, charitable giving to collectives serving women and girls, including giving circles, grew more than twice as quickly as giving to those serving the general population from 2012 through 2019, with particularly strong growth from 2018 through 2019.
“There’s a significant movement toward giving circles and collective giving generally,” Ackerman said, and collective giving itself is “a very kind of female phenomenon.” Even more promising is the fact that collective giving is diversifying. “Back in the day,” Ackerman said, collective giving was “much whiter, much older.” In recent years, though, there has been a huge increase in giving circles dedicated to specific identities, including collective giving groups dedicated to BIPOC and/or LGBTQ communities and causes.
Members of these collectives, Skidmore said, are focusing their giving on women and girls with diverse identities, but they also realize that their giving benefits their entire community. “It’s a both/and situation,” Skidmore said. “They’re recognizing the value of investing in women and girls, but also seeing that as a mechanism for lifting up communities as a whole.”
Given that girls and women make up roughly half the population, the fact that giving to benefit them uplifts entire communities seems so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said.
To help the organizations it has been studying, WPI is taking actions both to raise awareness long-term and to raise more money right now. Along with other organizations including the Women’s Funding Network, WPI launched the first Give to Women and Girls Day on October 11 to highlight the important work being done by these nonprofits and to issue a challenge to the entire philanthropic community: Increase giving to women and girls to 10% of the total — a big jump from WPI’s current estimate of around 2%.
The campaign featured tools for fundraisers, including graphics and suggested social media messages, to help even small nonprofits participate. WPI has also created a searchable database of women and girls organizations to help donors find these groups all year long.
“We’re really focused on getting donors and fundraisers in women’s and girls’ organizations to really use [the index and other materials] to make the case for support for their organizations,” Skidmore said.
Now that WPI and its partners aren’t just collecting data, but also helping women-and-girls-focused nonprofits spread the word, perhaps more institutional funders and major donors will start to get the message.