Study Cited as Proof Women Are More Generous

You may have heard or read recently that a study shows that women give significant more to charity than men. Here's the story as written by Associated Press writer Donna Gordon Blankinship.

The study offered several factors the researchers thought contributed to the growing generosity of women: More women are working and their incomes have grown, more have college degrees that yield greater earning power, and the percentage of women who make more money than their working husbands is now about 26 percent.

The study released Thursday found women give more in every income bracket except one: Those with incomes of between $23,509 and $43,500.

I'm always interested in the specifics.

The data used for the study was not broken down by gender, so researchers looked solely at households headed by single men or single women, including adults who have been divorced, widowed or never married. They looked at the donating patterns of about 8,000 American households.

So we're talking about singles. How good are single women, especially ones under 40, with their money? Are they willing to add to their debt by giving to charity because they expect a man to come along and pay off that debt? Who is paying for the dates these women are going on? How much would they be giving away if they paid equally for dates?

Previous research has shown that women encourage their husbands to give to charity and that women seem to be making a lot of charitable decisions in married households, but it's difficult to get hard data on those trends.

The fact is, women make most of the spending decisions in marriages. Women do most of the shopping, after all. This is why most ads target women and why ad-supported media usually caters to the sensititivities of women. Frankly, I'm glad my wife handles most of the shopping. She's very good at saving us money, and most stores other than media stores bore me.

Never married and divorced women were more likely to give, and to give more money than males of the same marital status, but widowers gave more money to charity than widows.

This could be because the never married women are counting on a knight to rescue them financially; I'd like to see the stats on divorced women linked to how much alimony they get. Widowers might be expecting that they don't need as much money to live on now that they're not supporting a wife.

Women probably are more generous. But just think about all of the "charity" men are "donating" to through taxes that pay for things the government shouldn't be doing – things that should be a matter of private, voluntary charity.