A few years before her death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg reviewed a portfolio of what would become $3.5 million in grants made in her honor by the Genesis Prize, which celebrates Jewish talent and achievement. Coming upon a proposal to study the gender gap in Jewish nonprofit leadership, she shook her head.

Ginsburg was dismayed that Jewish groups still wrestled with how to put more women into top posts, according to Jill Smith, a Genesis Prize executive who was with Ginsburg in her Supreme Court chambers during that review. Smith recalls: “Her attitude was almost: ‘We’re still doing this?’”

The report that the Ginsburg grant helped to fund was released Wednesday by Leading Edge, a group created in 2014 to strengthen the Jewish nonprofit leadership pipeline. It found changes that might have cheered the late justice and women’s-rights crusader: Half of Jewish federations, for instance, are now led by women. The report also features proposals to correct C-suite gender imbalances that experts say could help any nonprofit looking to increase the diversity of its leadership.

Still, the report acknowledges that despite decades of study, men still have a stranglehold on the leadership of large Jewish nonprofits. Sixteen of the 17 CEOs of Jewish federations in large metropolitan areas are men, as are almost two thirds of top executives at Jewish community centers.

“Everybody in this country is reckoning with systemic racism, and rightfully so,” said Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women. “But we also have systemic sexism.”

A leadership gender gap at large organizations is an entrenched issue for the nonprofit community as a whole. Women account for just 25 percent of CEOs at all groups with budgets of $50 million or more, according to Candid’s latest survey. Similarly, a Chronicle analysis found that women lead only 28 of the country’s 100 largest charities.

“The assumption and bias is that men are better at handling larger jobs,” said Frances Kunreuther, co-director of the Building Movement Project who has studied diversity in nonprofit leadership. “And men are seen as more competent and better in terms of fundraising.”

Faith-based nonprofits also can have theology-infused traditions and cultures that assign leadership roles exclusively to men. Previous reports on the gender gap in Jewish nonprofits — and there have been many in the past 20 years or so — point to “outright discrimination” and an “old boys’ network” that left women outside looking in.

“Our research shows that in many ways, the Jewish nonprofit sector operates like a family business industry,” said Leading Edge CEO Gali Cooks, with personal connections and attitudes holding considerable sway.

The gender gap in evangelical Christian organizations appears even larger than what’s found in the Jewish nonprofit community. Women hold fewer than one fifth of top executive positions, according to a national analysis of more than 1,400 groups. Dynamics similar to those affecting secular groups are at play, but theology and culture also contribute, said Amy Reynolds, one of the principal authors of that analysis and director of the Network Initiative on Gender, Development and Christianity at Wheaton, a Christian liberal-arts college outside Chicago.

She notes that evangelical organization staff and leaders have a wide range of views on gender. Although there is sometimes confusion as to their faith’s view of women in leadership, some groups embrace a theology that requires a man in the top job, particularly if there are spiritual elements to the position.

“Some organizations that we looked at want to be male led,” Reynolds said. “They would say straight up: ‘We don’t want a woman to be the spiritual leader.’”

‘The Dam Is About to Burst’

In the Jewish community, some are optimistic that change is imminent. Smith of the Genesis Prize is encouraged by the number of young people joining nonprofits who see the gender imbalance as unacceptable. “We’re at a moment where the dam is about to burst,” she said.

The leadership ranks of Jewish nonprofits — once largely static with top executives who stayed for 20 and 30 years — also are in the midst of enormous churn, according to Cooks of Leading Edge. “As new CEOs and senior leaders come in, there is a ripe opportunity for a lot of change,” she said.

The Leading Edge report aims to equip groups with the understanding and tools to seize this opportunity. During two years of research, it tapped 1,200 people through surveys, workshops, and listening sessions to help identify possible causes of the predominance of men. Applying network science and mapping those causes and their connections, the organization narrowed an initial list of 71 to five “keystones.” Addressing those causes, the report suggests, will yield the most change.

The first two keystones suggest that institutions have not prioritized addressing the disparity. Boards, donors, foundations, and others often don’t see leadership diversity as important enough to hold organizations accountable for it. At the same time, organizations themselves often haven’t built diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies when it comes to recruitment and hiring.

As a bright spot, the report notes that the San Francisco Bay Area’s Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund last year created a “job architecture” akin to salary bands. Thanks to that structure, it can compare its compensation with the market and track DEI goals and benchmarks, among other things.

The remaining three keystones point to individual prejudice and inaction as key factors. Nonprofit boards and search committee members, the report says, can be biased about the qualities of a good leader. Similarly, there’s a perception that a top executive can’t also be the primary caregiver in a family — a disqualifier for mothers often assumed to be most involved in raising children.

Finally, the report finds that men have failed to step up as advocates for women in leadership. This indictment echoes “The Week That All Jewish Women Turned Invisible,” a widely read essay by women in the Jewish nonprofit community that asked men to commit to specific actions to advance women in the field. Among other things, they asked men to recommend women for jobs and board positions and ensure gender balance on hiring committees.

Building Movement’s Kunreuther praised the report and said its diagnosis applied to discrimination at all nonprofits based on race and sexual identity in addition to gender. The causes “felt familiar and on point,” she said.

Katz of the National Council of Jewish Women also commended the report but stressed that pay equity is a critical part of any solution. “The foundational issue is pay equity,” she said. “Women can’t have equal power if we don’t get equal pay.”