I was happy to see an interview last week with the new Honolulu Symphony executive director, Tom Gulick and hear an interview with new symphony board chair Curtis Lee last week where both men acknowledged that the situation with the sale of balcony seats has been ill-advised. (Discussed in earlier entry)

They also acknowledged that the musicians need to be paid better and utilized more efficiently. (We got our fingers crossed for you guys

There is still no mention of Tom Gulick as the new ED on the Symphony website though. He isn’t even included on the administrative staff list. I am somewhat bemused at this situation since the Symphony Musicians have linked to every bit of news about Tom Gulick on their website. It would probably serve the musicians better in salary negotiations if the public didn’t know so much about Gulick. The less people know about him, the less sympathetic public opinion will be for him if negotiations go sour and the issue begins to play out in the press.

Of course, it is more in their interest if things go well and the concert hall fills with optimistic people who donate lots of money. So they are disseminating the good news and contributing to the general optimism.

The one thing Gulick said in his interview that I took some slight exception to was that “New York is the only cultural and artistic destination in the country.” I’d say that Boston, Philly, Washington DC and Chicago can hold their own with NY when it comes to attracting artists and cultural tourists. Not to mention that some people might want to visit Minneapolis and check out the new Guthrie Theater. And in the summer, people are happy to make cross country treks to places like Ashland, OR and Cedar City, UT for the Shakespeare Festivals or Charleston, SC for the Spoleto Festival. There are some who might say Nashville is the true center of American culture.

New York might be near the top of the list of very important locales in the artistic and cultural scene, but it ain’t the only one! As a guy who grew up in NY and proudly identifies the state as his origin, even I have to admit the country has a lot of important cultural and artistic destinations.

Via Arts and Letters Daily was an article by Christina Hoff Sommers that appears in In Character, “Men or Women: Which is the More Generous Sex?”

The short answer is, it matters on the situation. The long answer, which will give you some guidance in how you make your donor appeals, is contained in the article.

Depending on how laboratory experiments are designed either men or women end up emerging as more generous. When the design rewards risk taking, men come to the fore. When the design was purely about generosity, women were kinder.

This latter situation was also borne out by surveys where women’s answers about their generousity outstripped those of men.

However, outside of the lab and away from questionnaires, things are quite different. In a 2003 survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center it was determined that when it came to actually doing something for others, “gender is not noticeably related to altruistic behaviors.”

As the article points out, women and men are different in the way they express their concern for others. Society places women in a nurturing role and men in risk taking roles. Men become firefighters and jump into burning buildings, women become nurses and tend to the burns. The article notes there is nothing wrong with men or women fulfilling either of these roles.

But what about when it comes to donating money and not saving or soothing lives? Well, it looks like in practical terms, men are more willing to part with money than women.

A 2005 analysis of federal tax data by NewTithing Group, a philanthropy research institute in San Francisco, shows that even when you control for income and assets, males still write larger checks than females. As the New York Times summarized the NewTithing findings: �The study found that single men, generally, are more generous than single women. Among the wealthiest singles, men gave 1.5 percent of assets compared with 1.1 percent for women. Wealth does not explain the disparity.�

If this isn’t what you want to hear or doesn’t mesh with your experience, then read the article. It goes into more detail and cites specific examples from fundraisers.

A couple things to pay attention to though–1) All people quoted as saying women don’t give enough are in higher education fundraising, not arts or social charities. The article alludes to this as a weakness in the argument in regard to a UCLA quote by acknowledging the female graduates might be sending their money elsewhere, but it could as easily apply to the whole article.

2) Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the right of center American Enterprise Institute which may or may not have an interest in portraying males in a positive light for giving $10,000 while saying the wife who only donates $500 can afford to give more.

Still the article provides enough generally unbiased information to perhaps illuminate and guide fundraising campaigns and direct asking strategies. For example, a study by economists James Andreoni and Lise Vesterlund: (remembering this is in a controlled lab situation)

“When altruism is expensive, women are kinder, when it is cheap, men are more altruistic.” They also showed how their findings (along with several other studies they cite) could have important implications for fund-raising as well as tax policy. For example, if the Internal Revenue Service were to increase the price of donating to charity by no longer allowing deductions, it is quite likely that men would react more negatively than women. (On the other hand, women could object that the present system favors male styles of giving.)