Gender Differences in the Pursuit of Prestige in Charitable Giving: An Experiment

We examine gender differences in image-seeking preferences in a real-charity experiment. We utilized the category-reporting strategy that publicly acknowledged donors when their donation met a threshold. We varied the threshold to control the magnitude of the image benefits and switched on and off the public-reporting channel to isolate the effect of publicity. Men donated more than women when the star-donor threshold was high and when the donation was publicly acknowledged. Women’s average donations varied little with the threshold level or the publicity channel. Our result suggests that men conformed more to the imageseeker profile in their charitable giving than women.