Mind the (Altruism) Gap
Recently, young men have been in the national spotlight, with growing concern around toxic masculinity and the “manosphere”. It has become clear that the outlooks of young men and women are diverging in a lot of ways and we at Humankind Research are, naturally, intrigued. And given our expertise in the charity and not-for-profit sector, we are especially interested in understanding the differences between how young men and women are doing good.We conduct internal projects that explore new topics regularly and our recent project is focused on altruism amongst young people. In this mixed methods piece of work, we spoke to Gen Z and millennials to understand what ‘doing good’ means to them and explored if and how they engage in charitable activities.A clear finding is that Gen Z men are the least altruistic of all under 44s. While both millennial and Gen Z women engage in a similar level of charitable activity, there is a divergence between younger and older men: Gen Z men are significantly less likely to do charitable actions than both their female peers and millennial men.
Our analysis uncovered that altruism is typically driven by a combination of three components:
Optimism about the future
A sense of responsibility for making change
Feeling capable to make a difference
When analysing gender and generational differences, there are two key shifts that could help explain why young men are less likely to do good:
They feel less responsibility: twice as many Gen Z men actively say they do not feel responsible for making positive change in society (1 in 10) compared to millennial men (1 in 20).
They are less optimistic about the future: 1 in 3 Gen Z men say they feel optimistic, compared to 2 in 5 millennial men. While for women optimism has remained stable across generations, for men there is a notable decrease which suggests that Gen Z men are tending to feel more negative than the generation before them.
These gender differences are also evident in actions taken. Amongst Gen Z, more women do the most popular charitable behaviours than men:
Over two fifths shared a social medial post/online content about a cause, compared to just over a quarter of men
Two fifths of women donated goods to a charity shop compared to a quarter of men
A quarter of women sponsored or donated to someone trying to raise funds for a cause, compared to one in ten men
Gen Z women are also likely to do a wider range of charitable actions, with the average woman having done 2.5 types of action in the past 12 months, whereas for Gen Z men it is only 2 actions. While the gender gap does exist amongst millennials, men are more engaged. Millennial women also do an average of 2.5 types of charitable action, while men do an average of 2.3 (0.3 more than Gen Z men), highlighting that the gender gap is wider in the younger generation.
This altruism gap is just another example of the growing polarisation in mindset between Gen Z men and women, presenting an additional challenge to charities and not-for-profit organisations as they look to grow support amongst younger audiences.
Our findings also shed light on the different ways young people want to do good and what they want to see from charities. We will be running a webinar on our findings exclusively for charities on Tuesday 29th April, 12-12:45pm. If you work for a charity and are interested in hearing more in-depth findings, including a breakdown of the 5 charitable mindsets amongst Gen Z and millennials and how to engage them, please sign up here.
Honor Sullivan-Drage
Project Director