The Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy recently released a new report measuring charitable giving to women’s and girls’ organizations in the United States.
The Indiana University team has documented a total of 57,165 charitable organizations dedicated to supporting women and girls, roughly 3.6 percent of all registered charitable organizations in the country. More than $11 billion in philanthropic support was directed to women’s and girls’ organizations in both 2022 ($11.2 billion) and 2023 ($11.4 billion) – the two most recent years of IRS data on charitable organizations.
The report authors found that giving to women’s and girls’ organizations surpassed 2.0 percent of total charitable giving in the United States for the first time ever in 2022, reaching 2.18 percent, before decreasing slightly to 2.04 percent in 2023. Although there was a slight dip in 2023, total charitable giving to women and girls is up significantly from 2021 (1.86 percent).
A substantial portion of increased philanthropic support for women and girls in 2022 was directed to reproductive health organizations, which experienced a nearly 40 percent jump in 2022 – the same year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In 2023, $2.2 billion were invested in organizations dedicated to reproductive health and family planning. Organizations dedicated to women’s and girls’ human services and women’s health received the next highest share of total philanthropic support, each receiving $1.8 billion of the total $11.4 billion given to women’s and girls’ organizations in 2023.
However, after adjusting for inflation, charitable giving to women’s and girls’ organizations fell by 2.0 percent over the two-year period of 2021 to 2023. If giving to reproductive health organizations is excluded, the inflation-adjusted decline in philanthropic support for women and girls was even steeper, at 4.6 percent.