Damsel in Distress Vs. Build Back Better: Gender Stereotype Influences Philanthropy

Chivalry is not dead.

According to a recent study, men prefer to help women in the domestic sphere compared to the business sphere.

Male and female adult American subjects in an online study were given a cash prize of $10 and asked whether they would like to donate it to a man whose house burned down, to a man whose business burned down, or to a woman who experienced each of these losses.

The biggest differences in donor decisions were in the male subjects’ choice between helping a woman’s home or her business. Men were moved to donate to women in their domestic arena, compared with the arena of their livelihood. The amount of the donation was also significantly different: men donated an average of $4.00 (nearly half their total winnings) to a woman whose house burned down, and only an average of $2.48, when her business was destroyed. Women donors’ behavior did not show this gender bias.

The online results were replicated in a sample of university students studying management.

The study, published in the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, was conducted by an international collection of researchers: Professor Danit Ein-Gar of Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management, Dr. Orli Barkat, a post-doctoral student at Princeton University, and Professor Tahila Kogot from Ben Gurion University. They interpret their findings as indicating the impact of lingering sexism, specifically, “gentlemanliness reaches up to the point where it does not threaten their dominant status. A similar effect was not found when men were asked to donate to another man whose business burned down, compared with a man whose house burned down.”

That is, indeed, one possible interpretation. But is threat and dominance the only explanation for these findings?

It is equally plausible to see the male gender bias in affirmative terms, that men see the importance of home (signifying, among other things, safety, stability, and family protection) as relatively more important to female social and economic functioning. In cases of divorce, for example, women are more likely to remain in the family home, since they are more likely than men to be responsible for, and living with, children and other family members. A donor might judge the need to rebuild a woman’s burned-down home as primary, compared to her business, without resorting to conscious or unconscious perception of threat from female empowerment.

I congratulate the authors on this work and would like to see a follow-up study that asks subjects in the role of victims, what their preferences would be for help.