Giving to groups that serve women and girls grew in 2020, the year the Covid-19 pandemic first hit the United States, but charitable support for those organizations was less than giving to all other types of charities that year, according to a new study.
Women’s and girls’ charities received $8.8 billion in 2020, which was a 9.2 percent increase from 2019. But that $8.8 billion represents only 1.8 percent of total charitable giving to all other types of nonprofits in 2020, the findings show. All other causes saw an 11.3 percent increase in 2020.
The Women & Girls Index study, produced by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, is part of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Equitable Giving Lab, a program that is supported by Google.org and aims to create a better understanding of charitable giving to diverse communities and underserved groups of people. The study includes data from 51,756 nonprofits, 3.6 percent of total charitable organizations registered with the IRS.
Reproductive-health and family-planning nonprofits received $1.6 billion in donations in 2020, the most that any type of women’s and girls’ organizations received that year, the study found. Human-service groups that serve women and girls received the second largest total, $1.4 billion. Charities that work to prevent family and gender-based violence got $1.3 billion, as did women’s health groups. Women’s and girls’ education organizations received $1.2 billion.
Persuading Donors
The study’s authors wrote that many donors increased their 2020 giving to charities that serve women and girls most likely to provide some relief to people who were struggling during that first year of the pandemic. They say that the economic and social fallout from the pandemic erased much of the progress that had been made toward gender equity in the previous years and that women and girls will need additional resources to continue to make gains in the coming years.
Women’s and girls’ causes have been largely ignored for quite some time, says Jacqueline Ackerman, associate director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, which produced the study using IRS data from charities’ tax returns going back to 2012. She says the report’s findings offer a useful tool for fundraisers when they are talking to donors and making the case for support.
Ackerman says the findings have the potential to influence both donors who are interested in women’s and girls’ causes and those who are ambivalent. “The data is really helpful for women- and girls-serving organizations who want to make that case to their donors and say, ‘We are getting 1.8 percent of charitable support’ or ‘Look, this is how we fit in with the landscape of women’s and girls’ organizations.’”
Ackerman points to a recent Lilly School study that looked at charitable giving by affluent households. It found that wealthy donors who reported giving to women’s and girls’ organizations in 2022 said they were motivated when they learned that those organizations receive less than 2 percent of all charitable giving. She sees that as proof that showing donors such data can help fundraisers.
The authors of the latest study wrote in the report that the pandemic disproportionately affected women in numerous ways, including an increase in domestic violence. They highlight in the report a nearly 18 percent rise in contributions to family and gender-based violence-prevention organizations from 2019 to 2020 and suggest that donors may have been motivated to give to those nonprofits as incidents of domestic violence grew when schools, businesses, and other places shut down.
Ackerman says she wasn’t surprised by the increase in giving. She says domestic-violence groups did a good job getting the message out that stay-at-home orders would increase violence.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” she says. “It’s very disheartening that we learned that this specific type of violence increases when everyone is stuck at home. On the other hand, it is heartening that people heard that and responded, and we now have the data to say, yes, people responded philanthropically to hearing about that need.”
