Who gives more to charity: Rich men or rich women?

A study of America's wealthiest donors has some interesting findings about gender differences in charitable giving.

Page Rockwell

Dec 20, 2005 | Here's an interesting tidbit from yesterday's much-emailed New York Times story on the charitable-giving habits of extremely wealthy Americans: Really rich single women donate a smaller percentage of their assets to charity than really rich single men do.

"Among the wealthiest singles, men gave 1.5 percent of assets compared with 1.1 percent for women," Times writer David Cay Johnston writes. (The article's stats come from the New Tithing Group's report based on IRS data from 2003.) And though it's tempting to assume that these women give less to charity because they make less money than their male counterparts do, Johnston notes that "wealth does not explain the disparity" in charitable giving.

But even though rich women seem to donate less proportionally, rich women still give larger amounts than rich men do. This may be in part because super-rich women are, on average, wealthier than super-rich men. "Single men in the top income group, $10 million or more, had average investment assets of $124.7 million," the Times reports, whereas "the women averaged $244 million." Cool!

As it turns out, 247 women make $10 million or more a year, and they gave an average of $2.68 million each to charity; 655 men are in that stratospheric income bracket, and they gave an average of $1.95 million apiece.

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