The Women’s Philanthropy Institute’s latest report on philanthropic giving holds some welcome news for nonprofits serving women and girls in the United States: In 2021, charitable giving to these causes broke the $10 billion mark for the first time.
Despite this milestone, nonprofits serving women and girls ranked dead last in philanthropic giving among 10 nonprofit categories surveyed, receiving just 1.85% of all charitable giving that year. That fraction has barely inched up since 2012, when it stood at 1.58%.
The Women’s Philanthropy Institute is seeking to change that ratio. Based at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, it worked in partnership with the Equitable Giving Lab to draft The Women & Girls Index for 2024, which has been issued in advance of what the Lilly school and others have dubbed Give to Women and Girls Day. Launched in 2022, the day — October 11 — is devoted to raising awareness of the shocking funding disparities suffered by women’s and girls’ nonprofits.
The first edition of the Women & Girls Index was released in 2019, thanks to support from the Gates Foundation. Today’s report collects Form 990 data from the 54,588 IRS-registered nonprofits that serve women’s and girls’ causes and serves as a compilation of giving from all sources — foundations, individuals, corporations, etc. — making it the most complete available data set of the money that is (and is not) provided to these organizations.
This year’s index results will be discussed Friday at this year’s Give to Women and Girls Day event at the New-York Historical Society, as well as streamed online. The event, presented by Lilly and more than 20 partners — including the Amplify Her Charitable Foundation, Women of Color in Fundraising and Philanthropy, and Together Women Rise — has already received a $1 million commitment from the Amplify Her foundation. Money raised during the event itself will be distributed via Every.org.
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Creating ‘virtuous cycles’
In addition to breaking the $10 billion mark, this year’s index holds several other pieces of good news for nonprofits serving women and girls. The first is that charitable giving to these nonprofits increased 15% in 2021 over the previous year (though this increase was smaller than the overall increase in charitable giving of 15.4%). And while reproductive health and family planning nonprofits received the greatest amount of money given to all women’s and girls’ nonprofits during that time, donations to organizations serving women’s and girl’s civil rights and advocacy grew an impressive 60.9% from 2020–2021. Over the course of the decade covered by the index, philanthropic giving to women- and girls’-serving nonprofits overall grew by 94.9%.
In addition to her excitement that 2021 giving to women’s and girls’ nonprofits broke the $10 billion mark, Jacqueline Ackerman, WPI’s interim director and the index’s primary author, believes that the relative fundraising success of civil rights and advocacy nonprofits has the potential to boost giving to women’s and girl’s causes overall. “Those are the organizations that are going to create a virtuous cycle,” she said, because investments in those nonprofits will help them pursue the kinds of policies that “[allow] for more transformation for women and girls moving forward.”
Beyond the information contained in the index, though, the efforts of WPI and its partners to promote awareness of the funding disparities faced by women’s and girls’ nonprofits may also be starting to move the needle. As evidence, Ackerman pointed to a 2023 study by Lilly and Bank of America showing that 8% of affluent households that made donations to women’s and girl’s causes said that they did so after learning that women’s and girl’s nonprofits receive just 2% of charitable giving. That may sound negligible, but again — the index has only existed since 2019, and Give to Women and Girls Day has been around for just three years. That 8% figure, Ackerman said, “didn’t exist before they sent out that survey in 2023, so I do think there is something of a virtuous cycle where the more that we are sharing the research, the more that the data is going to change” in a positive direction. The “virtuous cycles” that Ackerman points to have also borne fruit in the birth of one of the main partners in this year’s Give to Women and Girls Day event — the Amplify Her Foundation was launched in 2022 in response to the 2% statistic.
WPI has also been working the press to get out the news about the huge disparity in funding for women and girls. Those efforts are beginning to flourish. The organization’s press liaison sent IP a selection of mainstream and philanthropic press coverage that includes the 2% funding figure. Granted, all of them, from CBS to the Associated Press, focused on Melinda French Gates’ $1 billion commitment to women’s and girl’s causes. Nonetheless, WPI is working to ensure that the press reports why French Gates’ move matters beyond the eye-popping dollar amount.
In addition to the Give to Women and Girls Day event and its other work to research and promote the facts about gender-based giving disparities, WPI provides a database of women’s and girl’s nonprofits that donors can use to find nonprofits to support, a toolkit for fundraisers in the sector, and all of its previous index reports.
There are additional reasons to hope that the next editions of the index will reveal positive changes in giving to women’s and girls’ issues. This year’s index report covers 2021. That was a year before the Dobbs decision gutted federal protection for abortion rights, and two years before SCOTUS banned affirmative-action admission programs in higher education, a decision that has been used by anti-racial-justice forces to challenge programs including philanthropic giving to Black women-led startups. While it remains to be seen just how much Dobbs has galvanized giving to reproductive services and advocacy for women’s and girls’ civil liberties including abortion rights, it’s hard to imagine that support for advocacy in particular has decreased since then.
“We can’t just sit by and say ‘Oh, Melinda French Gates has it’”
While waiting to see the impact of Dobbs on women’s and girls’ philanthropy in 2022 and beyond, there’s also reason to be concerned for this area of philanthropy in the future. It’s a safe bet that anti-abortion forces will attack giving for reproductive services and advocacy, just as the state of Florida is threatening media outlets for running ads supporting an abortion rights amendment, and it’s not hard to imagine anti-equity forces targeting nonprofits that focus solely on women and girls as well.
While acknowledging those possibilities, Ackerman expressed confidence that the trend of giving for women’s and girl’s civil rights in particular “can’t be reversed in one or two years. I know a lot of leaders in the field are looking at how to continue support in that area,” including working around or within any new restrictions that may be handed down by the courts.
Ackerman also has a message: “Donors really do have the power to change” the “simultaneously inspiring and dismal” numbers in the annual index, “but we can’t just sit by and say ‘Oh, Melinda French Gates has it,’” Ackerman said. Gates’ commitment is “wonderful, and that will lift the numbers up temporarily. But in order for this to surpass 2%, not just for one year, but for the indefinite future, we need everyone from Melinda French Gates down to the everyday donors that can do a recurring gift of ten bucks a month to really step up.” Surely, that’s a message worth heeding for everyday donors and foundations alike.
Correction: This article originally misspelled Jacqueline Ackerman’s name and misstated her title. We regret the errors.
In addition to women and girls’ philanthropy, Dawn Wolfe covers issues including economic and racial justice, LGBTQ giving, and philanthropic reform. She can be reached at: dawnw@insidephilanthropy.com
