Gender differences in European volunteer rates

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to identify the reasons for gender differences in European volunteer rates in different types of voluntary organisations. To that end, we focus in volunteer rates at individual and national levels. We have drawn our data from the European Values Survey (EVS, 1999 and 2008). We have employed Logit models carrying out independent estimations for the individual likelihood of working as a volunteer for four categories: social awareness, professional, education and social justice. We have carried out independent estimations and we have also repeated estimations by gender subsamples. Our main result is that social factors might be even more relevant for decisions to volunteer than individual socio-economic factors. Specifying the peer group as much as possible allows better control of social variables. For example, studying the female volunteer rate is more relevant to control for the female national NGO membership rate than the total national rate. We also highlight important gender differences. For example, education is positively correlated with decisions to volunteer for both genders in all categories, but the educational effect is stronger for men in relation to professional activities and stronger for women in relation to social awareness and social justice activities.

Keywords:

• Volunteering
• volunteer women
• gender motivation
• context
• volunteer activities

Notes

1. The European Values Survey is a large-scale, cross-national longitudinal survey research program on basic human values. Respondents are interviewed face to face for approximately one hour. In each country, the master questionnaire was translated in each language spoken by at least 5% of the population. The national effective sample size is 1200 for countries with a population over 2 million and 1000 for countries with a population above 2 million. Random samples give full coverage of the target population (persons 18 years and older resident in private households, regardless of nationality or language). Further information is available at http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/

2. The OECD Health Data is an essential tool to carry out comparative analyzes and draw lessons from international comparisons of diverse welfare systems. Further information is available at http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-data.htm.

3. The individual information provided by the EVS has been transformed into dummy variables (1: yes and 0: no). In the case of questions that have a closed list of potential answers, such as marital status, we have built a dummy variable for each category (married, single, divorced and widow). In the case of variables linked to the values and attitudes (reported on a scale from 1: Very important to 5: not important at all), the corresponding dummy variables take the value 1 if the individual reported values of 1 or 2, and 0 otherwise. The questionnaires are available at http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/.