Women Take Aim at Charity Gender Gap : ‘New-Girl Network’ of Nonprofit Groups Challenges Male Control in Fund-Raising

Women in 42 urban centers across America are exercising their economic power by starting philanthropic endowments, joining in the quiet but powerful role foundations play in shaping the direction of American society and its evolving values.

Pioneers in this women’s funds movement say they are creating a new style of giving and that their success demonstrates a significant development in feminism, as women of all economic levels begin asserting control over charitable donations and institutions, money matters traditionally dominated by men.

“We seek to help women and girls achieve self-sufficiency and economic independence,” said Elizabeth Bremner, director of the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation.

Funds organized by women in Los Angeles and Orange counties and 40 other urban centers expect to raise more than $20 million this year for programs that they say get only crumbs from male-dominated foundations and federated fund-raising organizations.

End Gender Gap

At a reception for the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation last month, Dodo Meyer, who runs Mayor Tom Bradley’s San Fernando Valley office, called for women to end the “gender gap” in charitable services. “Women should have more to say about how” the charity pie is divided, she said, “since we are now bringing home a bigger piece of the pie.”

These women’s funds, and nine more groups in formation, are organized in a variety of different ways. Some are federated fund-raising organizations benefiting a specific group of women’s and girls’ charities, some are private foundations, some are public charities and two are funds within community foundations. The causes include: parenting skills for teen-age mothers, day care for poor children, job training for displaced homemakers, shelters for battered women and rape treatment centers.

The funds anticipate raising less than $1 of every $4,000 that Americans are expected to donate to charity this year, but the movement’s leaders believe giving will grow exponentially in the next 10 years as more women become aware of the funds.

The Los Angeles Women’s Foundation board expects to set an initial endowment goal of $10 million.

In Laguna Hills, Orange County-The Woman’s Foundation has set an endowment goal of $3 million by 1990, said Jan Kingaard, the fund’s volunteer vice president.

4 Philanthropic Groups

Before 1980 only four philanthropic funds were devoted to women’s concerns, according to the National Network of Women’s Funds in Manhattan. The best known of these is the Ms. Foundation, created by supporters of the feminist magazine.

Brenda Funches of Silver Lake, a founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation, said the number of women’s funds has increased more than tenfold in seven years because women have become aware of how massive shifts in government spending priorities have hurt causes of concern to women. Nonprofit programs serving women and children have suffered “inordinately in the government funding cutbacks after 1980,” she said.

Leaders of the women’s funds movement say that their foundations also reflect fundamental changes taking place in how women of all economic levels relate to money and power.

“Even among the very wealthy, sexism has disenfranchised and disempowered women, kept them from controlling money,” said Marya Grambs, a clinical psychologist who is co-director of the Women’s Foundation in San Francisco.

“The women’s movement has just come to wealthy women 10 years later and that’s why these women’s funds are springing up all over the place,” said anthropologist Theresa J. Odendahl, a leading expert on the giving habits of the rich who recently became executive director of the Women’s Foundation of Colorado. “Initially, I think class solidarity was stronger than gender solidarity, but now even wealthy women are recognizing their inferior status compared to the men of their class.”

Diane Gornell, a consultant to the National Network of Women’s Funds, said “women are beginning to perceive themselves as having a role in philanthropy, making decisions about where they will give their money and what it will be used for.”

Demand for Education

Orange County-The Woman’s Foundation and some other funds report a huge demand by women of all economic levels for education on getting control of, and effectively using, the money they earn, receive or inherit.

A Ford Foundation study found that in 1974, women’s and girls’ charities got less than 1% of foundation grants. Joanna Hayes, president of Woman And Foundations/Corporate Philanthropy in New York, estimates this share is now 4%, but stills lags behind charities whose beneficiaries are mostly male.

Women’s funds movement leaders say that they are building a “new girl network” that encourages openness in the often aloof world of organized philanthropy. Some women’s funds actively confront men--who predominate as chief executives and trustees of charities--about narrowing the “gender gap” in nonprofit funding.

This philosophy of charity activism was demonstrated when the Women’s Foundation in San Francisco decided to “confront United Way of the Bay Area over the fact that they were giving $1 million more to boys’ programs than girls’ programs and, we noted, there are not more boys than girls so this kind of funding was untenable,” Grambs said. United Way of the Bay Area has since allocated $850,000 over five years to narrow the gender gap.

Also encouraging the women’s funds is a complete reversal in the gender of foundation staffs. A Russell Sage Foundation study found that in 1972 men held 83% of foundation professional positions. Women now hold more than 60% of these elite jobs, according to Elizabeth Boris, the Council on Foundations research director and co-author of a 1985 book on careers in philanthropy.

But while women predominate as No. 2 executives and giving officers, women serve as chief executive officers at only three of the more than 100 foundations with more than $100 million in assets.

So many women are grants officers that Jan McElwee, manager of charitable contributions at Carter Hawley Hale, quips that “talking about women in philanthropy is like talking about women in nursing.”

At the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation, where Bremner and a female aide are the only paid staff members, the concepts of independence, personal empowerment and economic self-sufficiency for women guide its grant making.

“We want to shine a very bright light on programs serving women and girls,” said Belinda Smith Walker of Pasadena, the Los Angeles foundation board president.

The foundation has raised about $130,000 so far, spending much of it on organizing and start-up costs.

The Arco Foundation gave $15,000, contingent on the new foundation raising $75,000 in cash and in-kind contributions. General Telephone of California promptly put up $15,000 on the recommendation of Pat B. Etienne of the Crenshaw area, the firm’s social responsibility manager and one of the nine women who started the foundation. Pacific Telephone hosted the foundation’s recent reception in Woodland Hills.

Lockheed California Co. gave $4,500 and printing, Sears Roebuck & Co. donated photocopying equipment and a Compaq computer system, Bank of America gave office furniture, Latham & Watkins donated the services of partner Al Rodriguez, a specialist in charity law, and Robert Segal gave the foundation a discount on offices in his building at 6030 Wilshire Blvd.

So far, the foundation has attracted fewer than 200 individual donors in the two years since it started seeking gifts. But in a county where more than 1-million women hold jobs, earning tens of billions of dollars annually, the endowment intends to grow rapidly.

Its organization partly reflects Bremner’s graduate studies at the University of the Redlands in 1983. As her master’s thesis, she designed a management model for a women’s foundation in Los Angeles, research funded by the Mott Foundation of Flint, Mich.

Focus on Career Women

Her thesis emphasized the long-term benefits of attracting highly diverse supporters from all races and a broad range of economic and social interests, but did not include a fund-raising plan.

The fund’s originators decided to focus initially on career women from a wide variety of occupations, cultivating them as donors at intimate gatherings they call “Friend Raisers.”

Bremner and Funches invited 43 women to a backyard barbecue “Friend Raiser” in Silver Lake in May. They raised $3,000 from 30 of the women, some of whom Funches said were giving to charity for the first time.

Funches described most donors as “single, career-types who make $27,000 to $40,000. We’re not headline grabbers, but worker bees and a few lapsed professionals who are raising families. Most are ardent feminists. Many were not previously givers, but then philanthropists are made, not born.”

This approach contrasts with Denver, where wealthy women pledged $2 million to the Women’s Foundation of Colorado. Odendahl, the new executive director in Denver, said this initial focus on rich women created some controversy and she has initiated a campaign to diversify support.

The Women’s Foundation in San Francisco has distributed more than $600,000 to 140 charities since it started raising money five years ago and has already raised nearly half of its $3 million endowment goal.

In Seattle, the Women’s Funding Alliance raised $130,000 last year, half from several thousand state and federal government workers who gave through payroll deduction, Executive Director Dyan Oldenburg said. The Alliance distributed nearly $40,000 to nine women’s and girl’s charities, which in turn used the money to attract other grants that doubled the value of the Alliance monies.

Leveraging small sums by helping grant recipients find new donors is a major theme of the women’s funds, as is targeting projects that promise huge payoffs in increased efficiency.