Men are more generous than women.

What’s that sound I hear? A cry? A shout, maybe? It’s probably the sound of angry letters pouring into the office, each of them eluding that somehow my mother did not raise me right.

For my mother’s sake, who is fantastic by the way, let me rephrase that sentence.

According to Statistic Canada’s latest information, 57 per cent of registered charitable donations come from the hairier sex.

That’s the numbers. The statistics. The facts. The raw data.

Yet, is it necessarily the truth? The truth of the matter is that generosity is a tricky subject.

With so many Canadian donors needing a daily trim of their facial hair, the first instinct is to claim men are significantly more generous than women. However, it takes a bit more to get to the bottom of issue.

According François Pagé, one of the top statistician in the income statistics division for Statistics Canada, we know that collected generosity statistics are based on income taxes.

This doesn’t take into account all the hours people spend volunteering nor does it differentiate exactly who is making the decision to donate within a household.

The most generous individual in a family could be the wife or it could be the husband. There is just no way for Stats Can to figure out who is the most generous of the sexes without going door to door and asking.

And nobody enjoys waking up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning to find men in suits carrying clipboards at their door.

The ways in which people donate can differ greatly.

Contrary to the image of the bloated, entitled lazy millennial generation, young people are actually giving up more of their time than ever to help out. They tend to want to feel connected to the charity they are working with. Blindly giving out large sums of money just doesn’t cut it.

On the flip side, regardless of their base income, the older generation does give more of their money, in fact up to five times more on average than those aged 24 or under. Yet, according to Mr. Pagé, they tend to stick to a charity of choice. It takes a lot for them to sway towards other causes.

So what influences people to be more generous?

It’s a subject that is being studied closely.

In 2009, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, received a $5 million grant to study behaviours that may influence giving.

Ironically, this money was donated to them.

The studies on the subject are going full steam ahead with an entire department dedicated towards the Science of Generosity, which is probably a degree as relevant to getting a job in the current market as receiving a PhD in Dance Studies at York University. (A real thing.)

Especially since researchers still haven’t learned much.

They did discover we get, as researchers call it, a ‘warm glow’ when being altruistic, or by being perceived as such.

Helping others, or at least being perceived as helping others, gives us a rush of happiness.

Preliminary reports have discovered the“warm glow” physical sensation, and even the actual desire to help out, begins in the brain. Probably in the amygdala and subgenual cortex, brain parts that control feelings of safety and happiness.

These squishy brain parts can be controlled by the hormone oxytocin, yes it really does always comes down to that sex hormone. When people are exposed to it they are 80 per cent more likely to be generous.

When questioned about their motivation, people often reply that volunteering or donating money made them happy and enriched their lives.

Whether more men than women are affected by this rush of hormones is still currently unknown. So claims that either sex is more generous or less is erroneous.

It does make for some interesting dinner table conversation as we question our motivations for being helpfull.

Frankly my life, however, is enriched by some chocolate and coconut rum.

I never said I was a philanthropist.

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