Gender and generosity in charitable giving: empirical evidence for the German Red Cross

Abstract

Results of earlier empirical research on gender differences in generosity regarding donations to charitable and other organizations are mixed. Our empirical study contributes to this research in that we analyse a new data set on the donations made by volunteers working for the German Red Cross. We report that women are more likely to spread their donations to more organizations than men, but among donors, the likelihood of making a large donation is larger for men than for women.

Keywords:

• gender
• donations
• volunteers

JEL Classification:

• A13
• A19

Acknowledgements

We thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

¹ Such a differentiation is interesting given that earlier research has shown that an expenditure-substitution effect may be at work with respect to charitable giving to different organizations. Reinstein (2011) argues that a expenditure-substitution effect is useful to discriminate between alternative models of charitable giving (pure public good, warm glow, etc.) and reports that especially ‘large givers’ tend to trade-off an increase of giving to one voluntary organization by decreasing giving to other organizations. We also accounted for the possibility that it may be difficult for respondents to discriminate between the categories ‘other clubs’ and ‘other organizations’. To this end, we combined the two categories ‘other clubs’ and ‘other organizations’ into a single category. Corroborating the results reported in this research, we found a significant gender effect when we studied the combined category.

² Unfortunately, we have no information on the response rate as the German Red Cross (GRC) distributed the questionnaire among its volunteers. We also emphasize that it is unlikely that all volunteers of the GRC received the questionnaire as the GRC has more than 400 000 volunteers in total. It follows that our sample may not be representative for the population of volunteers of the GRC.

³ When we dropped all control variables and estimated our models on 2274 observations, the results (not reported but available from the authors upon request) turned out to be very similar to the results reported in Table 1, the only exception being that gender had a significant and, as in Table 1, negative effect on donations to the GRC (but the pseudo R² of the model turned out to be low).

⁴ A natural question is whether our online survey excluded older volunteers. For this reason, we also studied the entire age distribution. The age distribution starts at a low level for volunteers younger than 20 years, then stays more or less flat between 20 and approximately 55 years and then gradually decreases.

⁵ As a robustness check, we replaced age with the duration of volunteering in the GRC and re-estimated our models. The gender effects turned out (in terms of the magnitude, sign, and significance of the coefficients) very similar to those reported in Table 1. Results are not reported, but are available from the authors upon request.

⁶ We calculated the marginal effect by fixing all other explanatory variables either at zero (dummies) or at their median values.