Women and girls receive less than 2% of all charity funds. That explains a lot about women's lives.

Women and girls are 50% of the population, but our/their needs are tragically underfunded. No wonder solutions for gender issues are so slow in coming...

A pioneering study about gender and non-profit work in Israel that came out last week shows a startling statistic. According to the research, organizations in Israel dedicated to gender or women’s issues receive less than 1% of all charity funding in Israel. Whar’s more, according to the study, which was commissioned by strategic consultant Kylie Eisman-Lifschitz who is also the founder of strategic management firm Workwell and the board chair of the agunah advocacy organization Mavoi Satum, over 80% of that funding goes to three major women’s organizations while the rest is divided among all the smaller organizations with annual budgets averaging $600,000. And the funding in the three major organizations is often allocated for children and day care and not directly for women.

If you think this is only an Israel problem, guess again. The study also cited figures that in the United States, non-profit programs for women and girls get a mere 1.6% of charity funding. That is not encouraging at all.

Kylie Eisman-Lifschitz

To understand what this means and why it happens, we have to take a step back and talk about women and money in general.

Overall, around the world, in almost every country and in almost every area, women have less money than men. This is a persistent and painful reality that hasn’t changed dramatically over the past few decades, certainly not in ways that we might have expected. According to the Pew Research Center, the gender pay gap in the United States is currently at 84 cents to the dollar — that is, women earn 84% of what men earn in comparable fields, adjusted for hours, seniority, etc. — compared to 64 cents in the 1980s.

In Israel, the gender wage gap is larger. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, women in Israel make roughly 68 agurot to the shekel compared to men, a number that has not significantly changed in the past forty years, and in fact the gap widened in 2018. The Adva Center also consistently finds that the gender pay gap is even worse in the Arab sector.

Similarly, according to the AAUW, for women of color and for women of size, the gap is even bigger than the average.

Overall this looks like some change is happening, but not for everyone. Although, among younger women, the gap is smaller, and among young and childless women, the gap is fairly narrow, the gender pay gap for mothers and women over 35 is actually increasing. Perhaps it should be called The Old Mother gap, as women seem to be punished for parenting and aging, something men are generally rewarded for.

Overall, both Israel and the United States are among the worst countries in the world in terms of the gender wage gap, according to the OECD:

This is bad news. But it gets worse. In the non-profit sector, the wage gap seems to be increasing.

And in the Jewish community, we see expressions of the gender gaps in many forms. Women non-profit execs make 60.74% of what men make. Only two of the major Jewish federations are headed by woman. According to the Forward salary survey of Jewish leadership, the gender wage gap is getting worse in Jewish organizational life. And among clergy, women rabbis make an average of $43,000 a year less than male rabbis. That is a LOT OF MONEY.

(Just one little personal anecdote: In the last salaried non-profit job I was working in right before Corona hit, I was making the exact same salary that I made in my very first job after graduate school in 1998. The exact same salary. After 25 years of experience, three degrees, and five books on gender, the needle had not moved at all. I would share the amount I was making here, but, frankly, it’s embarrassing. And there was zero room for negotiation. Believe me, I tried. I kept the job out of dedication to cause, which was women’s political leadership…. Yeah, I know. I spent my days writing about women’s leadership while being paid bubkes because the women’s organization did not have enough money to raise salaries for the all-female staff. I’m as annoyed about it as you probably are….)

These issues all impact one another. How much women make, how many women are in leadership positions, and how much attention is paid to women’s real lives. According to the Council of Non-Profits :

The pay gap results in significantly less economic power…. When magnified over the length of any woman worker’s tenure, and compounded annually, the pay gap creates significantly fewer dollars devoted towards employer-supported retirement savings and discretionary dollars for women to invest in their own retirement or health insurance” .

I created an infographic about how these issues intersect for Journal of the Association of Jewish Studies. You can see here:

Everything affects everything. Lack of women’s leadership leads to less attention to women’s lives, which means women’s needs are not met and women are not seen and women are not properly compensated and have a harder time getting ahead and are less likely to become leaders. All that feeds into each other.

Yet, one issue that is often overlooked even within these vicious cycles is philanthropy.

If women have less money than men overall, and if women who have dedicated their lives to social issues (by, say, working in the non-profit sector), have the least money of all, then of course women’s issues are going to be underfunded.

The group that needs the funding has the least amount of funding to give.

But until Kylie Eisman-Lifschitz’s study came out, we didn’t know quite how much of in impact this cycle has. Somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. When all these economic inequalities filter down, funding for women’s causes whittles down to 1-2%. #

When women don’t have enough money, every single cause suffers. Issues of domestic violence, sexual abuse, women’s education, girls in STEM, girls in sports, women in business, women’s health, breast cancer research, fertility support, women’s peacemaking, women in politics — all of these issues end up struggling. All of them. They compete for limited funding, and they all suffer. There are fewer resources to fight for women’s economic equality because women have less economic power. It’s a ripple effect.

Yet, even accounting for wage gaps and leadership gaps, the idea that women are getting less than 2% of all funding still sounds like quite a big gap. That’s fifty to one. Or 100 to one. Those are awful odds for women and girls’ funding. We are, after all, still half the population.

I think we need to drill down and look at what else might be going on.