For every nonprofit organization in Washington that advocates for boys and men, there are 50 organizations advocating for women and girls. This is a key finding from our investigation utilizing GuideStar.org, a database of U.S. nonprofit organizations.
Note: At the bottom of this post we explain the specific criteria and methodology behind our assertion of a 50 to 1 ratio.
Awareness of the vast imbalance in gender-specific advocacy in the public arena can help us understand how we arrived at the present circumstances that are documented in our articles about Disparities and Discrimination males are experiencing.
People do not know about boys and men’s issues because it is very few people’s job to speak up about them in order to influence policymaking and popular narratives.
Before we proceed, we offer two notes that give greater context to the discussion about gender-specific advocacy:
- Given that this inquiry we carried out accounts only for organizations that are legally registered in Washington, it leaves out major players that further contribute to the imbalance in gender-specific advocacy that affects Washingtonians. There are many national and international organizations whose advocacy efforts impacts people in Washington either directly or indirectly. Examples include UN Women, Human Rights Watch, Lean In, and National Coalition for Men.
- Given that our findings only involve nonprofit organizations, they leave out another important part of the equation when it comes to the asymmetry in gender-specific advocacy, which is the presence of government women’s commissions at the city, county, state, and federal levels.
Legacy organizations fighting for females
Many of us are familiar with the big-name legacy organizations whose missions are to advocate for women’s interests. They include the National Organization for Women (NOW), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the YWCA. Each of these has a Washington state chapter and/or many local chapters scattered around the state.
Representatives of these organizations routinely influence legislation and testify during public hearings in Olympia. For example, when one of the committees in the House of Representatives held a public hearing in 2018 on House Bill 2759, which eventually passed and created the Washington State Women’s Commission, a lobbyist for the Washington state chapter of the National Organization for Women was there to testify (starting at 1:00:10 in the video).
Smaller groups uplifting women and girls
There are dozens of smaller organizations fighting in the public arena to ensure women’s and girls’ issues receive attention and resources in Washington. Here are five examples:
- Legal Voice (Seattle, WA) is “a progressive feminist organization using the power of the law to make change in the Northwest.”
- You Grow Girl! (Seattle, WA) “empowers youth to become leaders to promote economic equity and opportunity for not only themselves but other sisters throughout Washington State.”
- End Violence Against Women International (Colville, WA) “envisions a world where gender-based violence is unacceptable…” [Note: The term gender-based violence is typically interchangeable with violence against women and girls.]
- Planet Women (Bainbridge Island, WA) “believes that diverse leadership and gender equity are essential to innovation and success at all levels of the environmental movement, from rural communities to the halls of government.” [Note: Organizations whose missions involve fighting for “gender equity” or “gender equality” typically focus 100% of their efforts on amplifying the female side of the equity/equality equation — in other words on empowering women and girls.]
- Days for Girls International (Bellingham, WA) “pursues advocacy work that shifts social norms and creates more supportive policy environments for menstruators worldwide.”
One nonprofit advocates for boys and men
Washington Initiative for Boys and Men is not registered as a nonprofit organization and basically does no fundraising. Therefore, we don’t show up in the GuideStar database.
One group that does show up in the database is Global Initiative for Boys and Men (GIBM), a 501(c)(3) organization that “supports the well-being of boys and men through research and advocacy.” GIBM’s leaders are our friends, and we greatly appreciate their work. GIBM is legally registered in Friday Harbor, WA and has a board member who lives in Washington, but their president is based in California, and their mission is national in scope. A portion of GIBM’s efforts focus specifically on matters here in the Evergreen State.
In our accounting of male-focused advocacy organizations we considered including Redmond-based Family Jewels Foundation, whose vision is that no one dies of testicular cancer. However, given that in our accounting of female-focused advocacy organizations we decided not to include organizations like Every Woman Can, which raises awareness about cancers affecting women, we similarly decided not to include Family Jewels Foundation.
Conclusion: Washington needs more advocacy for boys, male youth, and men
There is an enormous difference between the number of organizations (and therefore the number of hardworking lawyers, professionals, and volunteers) advocating for women and girls in Washington’s public arena, and the number advocating for men and boys. In a later article, we plan to lay out our findings regarding the disparity in revenue and assets between these two sets of organizations.
The bottom line is that males in Washington need more men and women speaking up to secure an equitable amount of attention and resources for boys and men’s issues. The creation of government commissions focused on the well-being of boys and men would be a helpful step in that direction.
The methodology behind our “50 to 1” assertion
Using GuideStar.org’s database of nonprofit organizations, we restricted our search to organizations that 1) are registered in Washington state and 2) advocate for the well-being and/or equal treatment of one sex/gender or another.
Our queries included words like women, men, boys, girls, advocacy, rights, and equality. Each of the searches turned up many hundreds of results, but most of those organizations did not fit the criteria for this investigation.
We winnowed the list down to include only those organizations for which we found evidence (typically on their website) that they carry out any advocacy tailored specifically to benefit either males or females. Below are some of the rules we followed when winnowing down the two lists:
- We excluded organizations that provide services to women or men but do not engage in public advocacy. Examples of such organizations include Bellevue-based Congregations for the Homeless (which serves homeless men) and Wenatchee-based Women’s Resource Center of North Central Washington (which serves homeless women). We excluded them because the point of this investigation is to show to what extent males and females in Washington have advocacy communities looking out for their well-being and equal treatment; to what extent there are special interest groups and lobbyists supporting them. The question of to what extent government services are provided equally to men and women is important, but it is outside the scope of what we looked at in this inquiry.
- We excluded organizations whose advocacy work solely benefits women who live outside of Washington state. Examples include Bellevue-based Media Matters for Women (benefitting women in Sierra Leone), East Wenatchee-based Freedom Firm (benefitting girls in India), Friday Harbor-based Resource Equity (benefitting women in various countries excluding the U.S.), and Seattle-based Gates Philanthropy Partners (benefitting women in various countries excluding the U.S.).
- We excluded organizations whose mission focuses on pro-choice or pro-life advocacy. Examples include Pro-Choice Washington and Planned Parenthood of Washington.
- We excluded organizations that have been dissolved or are inactive.
For organizations with multiple chapters/branches throughout the state – specifically NOW, AAUW, and YWCA – we counted each branch as its own organization because each one is registered as a separate 501(c)(3) and has its own entry in the GuideStar.org database. If we were to exclude all chapters/branches of NOW, AAUW, and YWCA, our list of female advocacy organizations would come to 43. When we include all those chapters/branches, the total reaches 95 organizations. Rather than landing on 43 or 95, we chose 50 as a reasonable figure. On the male advocacy side, things were much easier. We found only 1 organization: Global Initiative for Boys and Men.
We have transparently laid out our methodology, which tries to remove subjectivity in generating the two lists of advocacy organizations. However, we acknowledge this investigation is imperfect and involves some degree of subjective interpretation. Readers may object here and there to certain instances of us classifying an organization as a gender-specific advocacy organization or as not a gender-specific advocacy organization. What cannot be denied, though, is the asymmetry in the volume of gender-specific advocacy in Washington state.