Emma M.H. sent us a link (via Jewish Philanthropy) to a study by the Center of Philanthropy, at Indiana University, about differences in financial donating by men and women. The report looks at data from a 2007 nationally representative survey of households, in which respondents were asked about their charitable giving in 2006. To isolate differences in giving, the report includes data only on single heads of household (whether never-married, divorced, or widowed), since in married households it’s difficult to distinguish who made the decision to donate (they point out that the literature is also very clear that married households are much more likely to donate than non-married households). You can get a copy of the actual questionnaire here.

They break the data down by income as well, dividing them into quintiles (that is, each category contains 20% of respondents). The income quintiles are: Q1 = $23,509 or less, Q2 = over $23,509 but less than $43,500, Q3 = over $43,500 but less than $67,532, Q4 = over $67,532 but less than $103,000, and Q5 = $103,000+.

As we see, in each income category non-married women were more likely to donate to charities of some sort:

Women also generally gave more:

It’s interesting to me that the total amount of the giving doesn’t vary more by income for non-married women (the amount of reported giving is basically the same for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quintiles), yet varies so much for non-married men. Thoughts on what’s going on there?

Likelihood of giving also varies quite a bit depending on type of single status — those who are widowed are quite a bit more likely to donate than the never-married, which is probably partially a factor of age and related factors like generally higher incomes/wealth:

As we’ve posted on in the past, women are also more likely to be involved in volunteer work.

I’d love to see a breakdown of where men and women donate, but the report didn’t provide that level of detail.