Soc Sci Res. 2015 Jul;52:83-98. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.12.014. Epub 2015 Jan 12.

What drives the gender gap in charitable giving? Lower empathy leads men to give less to poverty relief.

Author information

¹Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Building 120, Room 160, Stanford, CA 94305-2047, United States. Electronic address: willer@stanford.edu.
²School of Social Work, Columbia University, 1255 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY, 10027, United States. Electronic address: cw2727@columbia.edu.
³Department of Sociology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Building 120, Room 160, Stanford, CA 94305-2047, United States. Electronic address: owens.lindsay@gmail.com.

Abstract

We draw upon past research on gender and prosocial emotions in hypothesizing that empathy can help explain the gender gap in charitable giving. In a nationally representative survey, we found that men reported less willingness to give money or volunteer time to a poverty relief organization, gaps that were mediated by men's lower reported feelings of empathy toward others. We also experimentally tested how effective a variety of different ways of framing poverty relief were for promoting giving. Framing poverty as an issue that negatively affects all Americans increased men's willingness to donate to the cause, eliminating the gender gap. Mediation analysis revealed that this "aligned self-interest" framing worked by increasing men's reported poverty concern, not by changing their understanding of the causes of poverty. Thus, while men were generally less motivated by empathy, they responded to a framing that recast charitable giving as consistent with their self-interest. Exposure to the same framing, however, led women to report lower willingness to volunteer time for poverty relief, suggesting that framing giving as consistent with self-interest may discourage those who give because of an empathic response to poverty.