چه چیزی باعث شکاف جنسیتی در کمک های خیریه. همدلی پایین تر منجر به رفع کمتر فقر توسط مردان می شود

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.

The United States is unique among developed, Western democracies for maintaining a relatively small welfare state and offering relatively limited public assistance to the poor (Lipset, 1996 and Smeeding, 2008). Consequently, the U.S. is also distinct for its heavy reliance on non-governmental organizations (e.g., churches, secular charities) for the funding and delivery of relief services to the poor (Katz, 2001). As a result, the well-being and life chances of the American poor are more influenced by contributions to antipoverty organizations than in other advanced democracies. Because of this reliance on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the provision of assistance to the poor, it is especially important to develop a strong understanding of the factors that elicit concern and support among Americans for the poor and the NGOs that provide for them. In contrast to this, past research on Americans’ poverty concern has overwhelmingly focused on support for governmental policy, while little research examines the factors influencing support for non-governmental poverty relief (Gilens, 2000 and Alesina and Glaeser, 2004). However, such an understanding is essential if poverty relief is to be sustained, especially during difficult economic periods when demand for relief increases as contributions decline (Boris et al., 2010).