Do Men Give Back More Than Women? Released today a university study claims to find that women donate less to charity than men because they feel more pressured to give money when they don’t want to. The study suggests women donate less to charity than men because they feel more pressured to give money when they don’t want to researchers found that women were more likely to try and avoid donating
Say this is because women are more affected by social pressure to donate and feel more obliged to But men have a ‘simpler thought process’ so are more likely to donate simply because they are asked to
Women are more likely than men to dodge an opportunity to donate to charity, researchers have claimed.
Although women and men were seen as equally generous when approached for money without prior warning, when the sexes were given the option to opt-out before being asked, women were more likely than men to take this opportunity.
The researchers, from the University of Chicago and University of California Berkeley, say this is because women feel under more social pressure to donate, because they can recognise social clues better than men, and will avoid this pressure where possible.
Research from Sheffield Hallam University found that men are more likely to be generous when there are attractive women nearby. And the more attractive the woman, the more selfless the man becomes.
In the first study, 65 men and 65 women with an average age of 21 anonymously played a game in which they could donate money via a computer program to a group fund.
The donations were selfless as the participant would not necessarily benefit from them but all other players would. While playing the game, each participant was then watched by either an attractive man or an attractive woman. The study found that the male players did more good deeds when observed by the woman.
But there was no parallel effect for the women, and women performed the same number of deeds regardless of the sex of the person observing them. Men, on the other hand, don’t recognise social clues and have a ‘simpler thought process’ so are more likely to donate simply because they were asked to.
The study tested people’s motivations to donate and whether they responded to social pressure or from an attitude of altruism, or selflessness. To do this, Professor John List, University Chicago economist and expert of philanthropy and his team visited neighborhoods in Chicago that were considered to be affluent.
The team said they were raising money for a local children’s hospital.The researchers from Chicago and California also considered the impact of people’s apprehension, particularly among women, to opening the door to a stranger, yet this was discounted.
List and his team found that women were just as likely to open the door as men. If security was a particularly strong concern among women, the gender differences would have appeared among the people who were contacted unannounced, he said.
The results of the study are published in the May issue of the American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings. This study also found that women were less likely to participate in surveys compared to men and concludes that women behave in this way because they have ‘less dispersed distribution of altruism.’
This contradicts previous research from Bolton and Katok in 1995 that found no evidence of gender differences in generosity.
Eckel and Grossman in 1998 alternatively found that women share twice as much on average. Who do you think Gives Back more BCG Friends, Men or Women?
