New study finds young women donate

Among the crowd funding projects that I have had some close contact with, like Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation; Feministing Times Ten; She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry; and Equal Means Equal, the community around Feministing has played a strategic and large part in the success of those campaigns. This community puts its money where its mouth is! 

Along comes this great study Women Give 2014 that corroborates young women’s generosity. Conducted by the Indiana University Women’s Philanthropy Institute, Women Give 2014 set out to explore how young women without any religious affiliations fared as donors. The results were surprisingly strong.

According to the study, NONES are young (less than 45) single women who are religiously non-affiliated. NONES:

• give roughly two times larger amounts to Not-religiously identified organizations (NRIOs) than they do to religiously identified organizations.

• give roughly two times larger amounts to charitable organizations than do young men.

• give more than two and a half times larger amounts to charity than middle-age and older women who are NONES.

Activists among the Feministing community maybe already know this intuitively. But it is heartwarming to see it bares real fruit in this documentation. With now a full one-third of all Americans under the age of thirty without religious affiliations, there was concern that giving might decline. This study turns that fear on its ear.

Go girls, and go with your pocketbooks!