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Two major American universities were asked to do one thing after my mother died in April: acknowledge her passing. The foundation she co-created nearly 50 years ago, the Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation, had given hundreds of millions of dollars to higher education, much of it to the University of Florida and UC Berkeley. Both universities refused, failing even to issue a press release to mark her passing.
UC Berkeley initially had a tribute written and ready to publish — but an administrator decided it was only “fair and transparent” to consult her ex-husband first. That would be my father, the man she chose to divorce after 55 years of marriage. The tribute was never published.
The University of Florida said it wanted to be “responsive” but also needed to consult my father first. It then declined entirely, citing vague legal considerations it has never specified. By contrast, the following month, the university hosted an 87th birthday party for my father, transforming the lobby of the Wertheim UF Scripps Institute — in a building my mother helped pay for — into “Herbie’s Yacht Club” for the lavish event.
Why the disparity? Presumably because after my parents’ divorce a year and a half ago, universities that had received their largesse were angling for more by trying to remain in the good graces of my father, who now controls the foundation. Never mind that the simple principled action would have been to acknowledge the passing of one of the most significant donors in their institutional histories.
Nicole Wertheim was a builder. Beginning in 1977, she and my father used earnings from their growing business to establish the Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation.
“We were both very hard-working, and we had nothing,” she said in a 2019 interview. “We just wanted to build something together.”
My mother was not a passive figure in this work. Her name was on the foundation itself, the gift agreements and the legal contracts that formalized every major gift. The word “family” in the foundation’s name was not decorative. It was a declaration of intent — her declaration — that what she and my father built would grow across generations. She gave as a full participant in creating that wealth. She was not a plus-one.
Ignoring her death is part of a pattern in American philanthropy that I call institutional infidelity: the minimizing and quiet reassignment of a woman’s philanthropic identity to her husband.
The betrayal rarely announces itself. It accumulates through small, compounding decisions, particularly in periods of conflict such as divorce — and at death. Communications are quietly rerouted. Deference is recalibrated. Visibility reassigned.
The ethical problem is straightforward. Philanthropic gifts made by couples are the result of joint effort, joint capital and joint commitment. When institutions accept those gifts, they enter into a relationship with two people. That obligation does not dissolve if the marriage does.
What happened to my mother reflects something larger than one family’s experience. The institutions that maintain relationships with philanthropists have a structural blindness about who is actually driving charitable giving, and that blindness is going to prove costly.
Research from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy finds that women now influence or make 85% of a family’s philanthropy-related decisions and are more likely than men of equivalent means to give at all. Development offices that structure their relationships primarily around the male partner are not simply being inequitable; they are misreading their own donor base.
Apparently the implications of MacKenzie Scott’s example have not fully landed. During her marriage to Jeff Bezos, Scott was among the least publicly visible figures in American philanthropy despite her foundational role in Amazon’s early years. Since their 2019 divorce, she has donated more than $26 billion, averaging more than $5 billion annually, which makes her one of the most consequential philanthropists in American history. Her giving in 2025 alone surpassed Bezos’ total lifetime charitable contributions.
Scott is an exceptional case in scale. The dynamic she represents, however, repeats across American giving at every level of wealth. This is where philanthropy’s ethical failure and its institutional self-interest meet.
By 2030, McKinsey projects that women will control approximately $34 trillion of wealth transfer expected from baby boomers. They will inherit from aging parents and, in most heterosexual couples, from husbands they outlive. They are already the primary or equal decision-makers in the vast majority of high-net-worth philanthropic households.
Women who become widows are about three times as likely as the average household to change their financial adviser, reflecting how poorly institutions have cultivated relationships with women as independent principals rather than as half of a couple.
Philanthropy is making the same mistake when they signal that a woman’s standing derives from her husband’s.
The remedies are straightforward. Gift agreements involving couples should require both signatures, conferring equal legal standing to both parties. Development offices should maintain independent, equal communication with both donors regardless of marital status and must not quietly redirect that communication if divorce is initiated or if control of the foundation shifts to one party.
These are not radical standards. They are the minimum that a serious legal and financial relationship requires.
My mother spent more than 50 years building a philanthropic legacy. On the occasion of her death, the institutions that benefited were not asked to take sides in a private family dispute; they were asked simply to honor what was already written on their own walls. Instead, they defaulted to a version of power that should be a relic of the past.
That is the quiet architecture of institutional infidelity: keeping the woman’s name on the plaques while stripping away her humanity.
Legacy is not discretionary, and a woman who spent her life building it should never need permission to be remembered.
My mother deserves better. Much better.
Erica Wertheim Zohar, an entrepreneur, philanthropist and journalist, is the author of “High Trust Worth.”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that two major universities’ refusal to publicly acknowledge Nicole Wertheim’s death, despite decades of major gifts, exemplifies a broader pattern the piece calls “institutional infidelity,” in which women co-donors are quietly written out of the story once a marriage ends or a spouse dies.
It contends that in the Wertheim case, UC Berkeley and the University of Florida deferred to the ex-husband, who now controls the family foundation, in deciding whether to issue a tribute, and even staged a lavish birthday celebration for him in a building she helped fund, which the piece interprets as institutions prioritizing future fundraising over basic fairness to a woman donor.
The article maintains that philanthropic gifts made by couples reflect joint labor, capital and commitment; therefore, when institutions accept those gifts, they enter into a relationship with two principals, and that ethical and relational obligation does not dissolve with divorce or death.
It further argues that ignoring Nicole Wertheim’s death is not an isolated slight but a symptom of a structural blindness in philanthropy to who actually drives giving, noting research that women now influence or make a large majority of family philanthropic decisions and are more likely to give at all than men with comparable means.
Building on that, the piece stresses that development offices that structure relationships primarily around the male partner are not only being inequitable but also misreading their own donor base at a time when women’s financial power is rapidly expanding.
The article uses MacKenzie Scott as a high-profile example of this misreading, noting that Scott was little noticed in philanthropy while married to Jeff Bezos but, post-divorce, has given tens of billions of dollars and now ranks among the most consequential donors in American history, even surpassing her ex-husband’s lifetime giving in a single year.
It highlights projections that by 2030 women will control tens of trillions of dollars in wealth transferred from parents and spouses, and notes that widows frequently change financial advisers, which the piece reads as evidence that institutions have failed to cultivate women as independent decision-makers and will suffer consequences as women redirect their giving.
The article argues that philanthropy’s ethical failure and its institutional self-interest converge here: treating women as “plus-ones” rather than full partners is both unjust and strategically shortsighted, given women’s growing control over wealth and inclination to give.
As a remedy, it calls for concrete changes: requiring both spouses’ signatures on gift agreements to confer equal legal standing; maintaining independent, equal communication with each donor in a couple regardless of marital status; and prohibiting development offices from quietly rerouting communication or deference to the husband if a divorce occurs or control of a foundation shifts.
Finally, the piece insists that honoring Nicole Wertheim’s life and philanthropy should never have required her ex-husband’s permission, arguing that keeping her name on buildings while erasing her from institutional memory strips away her humanity and illustrates how women’s legacies are too often treated as discretionary.
Different views on the topic
Some philanthropy analysts argue that the sector is already moving—albeit unevenly—toward more intentional engagement with women donors, framing women not as sidelined “plus-ones” but as a key leverage point for expanding and improving giving; commentators in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, for example, emphasize that women donors bring collaborative, equity-focused approaches and urge nonprofits to design strategies specifically around their interests and leadership, suggesting a more optimistic trajectory than the article’s portrayal of entrenched disregard.[3]
In addition, research and commentary highlight that women’s rising share of wealth does not automatically translate into institutional power, complicating the article’s prediction that philanthropy will inevitably “regret” sidelining women; networks like WINGS point out that even as women are set to inherit unprecedented wealth, existing norms and structures can blunt that shift, meaning that without broader changes in governance and culture, wealth alone may not force institutions to treat women donors differently.[2]
Other critics of mainstream philanthropy contend that focusing on how elite women donors are treated risks obscuring deeper structural injustices; the Black Feminist Fund, for instance, documents that only a tiny fraction of global foundation funding goes to Black women, girls and trans people, and argues that philanthropy’s central problem is chronic underinvestment in marginalized communities at the intersections of race, gender and class, not only the under-recognition of wealthy women benefactors.[5]
Along similar lines, gender-justice advocates in philanthropy emphasize that the most urgent gender gap is not at the level of naming rights but in economic security, care infrastructure and workforce equity for older and less affluent women; analysis in Philanthropy Women urges funders to tackle structural ageism and sexism by investing in care systems, employment pathways and mentorship for older women, suggesting that rectifying symbolic slights against high-net-worth women should not overshadow broader systemic reforms.[1]
Furthermore, experts examining the internal dynamics of nonprofits argue that the sector’s gender problem is at least as much about how women staff are treated as how women donors are recognized; reporting in the Chronicle of Philanthropy notes that women working at nonprofits face persistent pay gaps, limited advancement and cultural barriers, and that talking openly about these issues remains difficult, indicating that donor-relations reforms alone will not address the entrenched gender inequities that shape philanthropy from the inside.[6]
Some philanthropy reformers also caution against centering the experiences of any class of big donors—men or women—as the primary lens for change; advocates calling for “shifting power in today’s philanthropy” argue that the sector should move away from donor-driven models and toward community-led decision-making, warning that improving how institutions court wealthy women could still reinforce top-down control and gatekeeping unless power is redistributed to those most affected by philanthropy’s choices.[4]
Finally, commentators concerned with democratic accountability argue that the core issue is the outsized influence of large private fortunes on public life, not only who within affluent families receives recognition; from this vantage point, as long as major universities and nonprofits rely heavily on very large gifts, institutional behavior will tend to follow whoever controls those funds, regardless of gender, and critics urge greater public funding and transparency so that questions of legacy and naming rights do not overshadow debates about who sets priorities in the first place.[4][5]
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