Why do some nations, such as the United States and Sweden, have booming nonprofit sectors, whereas other economically similar countries, such as Japan and Italy, do not?
A new study uncovers a surprising answer: It’s the women. The more empowered a country’s women, the more vibrant its nonprofit sector.
“Other research shows that women tend to be more altruistic, more prosocial, and less corrupt [than men],” explains study author Nuno S. Themudo, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. “Yet in many parts of the world, women cannot actively participate in civil society.” In countries where women can take their talents into the public sphere, he observes, the nonprofit sector employs more people, retains more members, and attracts more volunteers.
For his research, Themudo uses the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), which reflects how many parliamentary, management, and professional positions the women of a country hold, as well as the percentage of income they earn. Then with data for 40 countries from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, he finds that the higher a country’s gem score, the greater its percentage of working-age full-time employees in the nonprofit sector—even after controlling for nation-level indicators of government failure, market failure, income, and social origins (for example, British heritage and socialist heritage).
Likewise, with 2006 World Values Survey data from respondents in more than 80 countries, Themudo shows that the higher a nation’s gem score, the more its people join and volunteer for a variety of nonprofits. These analyses control for factors known to aff ect survey respondents’ nonprofit participation, including age, education, income, employment status, and marital status.
Although Themudo’s studies dispel many alternative explanations for the link between women’s empowerment and nonprofit sector strength, they cannot pin down “whether women’s empowerment grows the nonprofit sector or a strong nonprofit sector empowers women,” he says. “It’s probably both.”
What is clear from his findings, says Themudo, is that “the nonprofit sector is not a wastebasket for women who can’t make it in other sectors”—an idea other scholars sometimes promote. “Instead, the more empowered women are, the more likely they are to work in the nonprofit sector.”
Themudo also notes that, despite the “enormous contributions” of women to the nonprofit sector, their efforts often go unnoticed. “When I started this project,” he says, “I was surprised that there were no studies in the nonprofit research literature relating gender to the sector.” Nonprofit organizations themselves similarly slight women, Themudo says. “The majority of [U.S] nonprofit sector employees are women. Yet men are six times more likely to head a large nonprofit. Nonprofit leaders really should ask themselves if they are inadvertently preventing women from rising to the top.”
Nuno S. Themudo, “Gender and the Nonprofit Sector,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 38, 2009.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.