It's the old story out of the for-profit world. The largely male board members of a charitable group meet to hire a new leader — and choose someone who looks like themselves.
This behavior has costs. Nonprofits with few women on the board miss out on donations from affluent women and hobble their missions, a new poll commissioned by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and NYU's George H. Heyman J. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising found.
Harris Interative in March surveyed 644 women who worked full-time for nonprofit organizations. Sixty-two percent of the respondents said they had worked in the nonprofit sector for 10 years or more.
The poll revealed that 59% of respondents at nonprofits with at least $25 million in assets said their organizations would be more effective at advancing their mission if they had more women on the board. Another 58% said their organizations' fundraising efforts among women would be more effective.
Seventy-one percent of women from large nonprofits said their organization's chief executive was a man, and 69% said their board was "predominantly male."
Forty percent of women at large charities said their organizations did not try as hard to identify and solicit donations from affluent women as they did from men, leaving significant money on the table. However, 36% said wealthy female donors received the same respect from their nonprofits as wealthy male donors.
Indiana University's Debra Mesch, director of the Women's Philanthropy Institute, told The Chronicle her own research had found that female donors tended to be more loyal than their male counterparts and were often better at asking their networks for donations and other resources.
"We certainly see that in many studies there are financial gains for organizations when more women are on the board," Mesch said.
Reaching for the Top
The poll found that women were confident about their ability to lead a nonprofit. Fifty-seven percent of respondents who were not already chief executives said they wanted to lead a nonprofit.
Seventy-two percent of all the women under age 34 said they wanted to be a leader. Ambition decreased with age, with only 30% of those 55 or older aspiring to leadership roles.
