This is original data, written up in the general style of a scientific paper (albeit somewhat more informally). It should be readable regardless of background, although for a summary you can skip to the discussion or conclusion. I encourage comments, criticism, and suggestions, especially (but not only) from people with backgrounds in research.

Note: Since posting, this page has undergone nontrivial revisions. See § 7 for details.

Sections:

(Length: 1,500 words.)

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1. Introduction

“Understanding Male Disposability” (§ 1.3) gives many examples of commentary on homelessness that suggests that people have more concern for homeless women than homeless men. For example, the mayor of Portland, Oregon singles out female homelessness as especially heart-wrenching, and Dion Oxford of Toronto’s Salvation Army Gateway shelter for men says that it’s harder to raise money for men’s shelters.

In addition to this, two panhandlers interviewed by a panel for PBS NeedCom report anecdotally that women receive more money than men. Donald and Prim:

Ladies get more money than men. Because they’re ladies. That’s basically how it is. I don’t know how or why.

I think it’s a little easier for me because I’m a woman, and I’m the only woman panhandler all around here. It’s easier for a woman. And it’s harder for a man. […] And a woman all by herself, who’s homeless … they just sympathize more.

Here I conduct an online survey-based study on willingness to give money to panhandlers, testing two hypotheses. Based on those anecdotal reports on earnings, the first hypothesis is that people will be more willing to give money to female panhandlers. The second is that the disparity will be larger among feminists than non-feminists, based on the idea that identifying with feminism means increased focus on women’s well-being.

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2. Methodology

2.1 Participants

One-hundred and nineteen Americans were recruited from an online research platform and paid a small sum to complete the survey, which took approximately one-and-a-half minutes. Demographic information collected included age (mean = 32.2, sd = 10.9, range = 18–64), gender (63 men, 60 women, and 1 other), religious status (29 religious and 90 non-religious), politics (77 left-leaning, 27 centrists, and 15 right-leaning), and feminist status (61 feminists—30% of men and 68% of women—and 63 non-feminists).

2.2 Materials

Four panhandler descriptions were created. Each description mentioned age and gender (no other physical characteristics) as well as the message on their cardboard sign.

Each appeal was taken from real panhandler signs mentioned in news articles (links included above), selected to cover a variety of different types of scenarios/requests.

2.3 Procedure

Participants saw the survey with “man” in the even number items and “women” in the odd number items, or vice versa. It was presented with the following instructions:

Decide how much money you would be willing to give each panhandler below, based on their descriptions. Enter any value between $0.00 and $10.00. Don’t include the dollar sign. You can specify cents (for example, 0.25 or 2.50) or whole dollar amounts (for example, 1 or 5).

A $10 maximum was included to ensure realistic answers (although in hindsight I wonder if a lower maximum would have been more realistic). After the survey, participants gave their age, gender, feminist status, religious status, and political affiliation.

2.4 Data Analysis

Hypothesis 1 (people will offer more money to female panhandlers) and Hypothesis 2 (the disparity will be larger among feminists than non-feminists) will be tested using a linear mixed effects model (lme4/lmerTest in R) on the dollar amount responses. The model will have three fixed effects: panhandler gender (man, woman), participant gender (man, woman), and feminist status (feminist, non-feminist). In addition to these fixed effects, the two random effects are participant (n = 124) and scenario (n = 4). The category identifying their gender as “other” will be excluded from the statistical analysis due to only one person picking this option (but not excluded from the reported means and figures).

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3. Results

3.1 Statistical analyses

The mean amount of money offered to men was $2.44 (sd = 3.05), and the mean offered to women was $2.60 (sd = 3.22). While this was 6.7% more, this difference was not statistically significant in the mixed effects model (see target in the appendix).

Figure 1

Turning to feminist status, while feminists exhibited a numerically larger bonus for women, this was also not statistically significant (target:feminist in appendix).

Table 1. Money given by panhandler gender and feminist status of participant

Non-feminists (n = 63) Feminists (n = 61) Men $2.60 $2.27 Women $2.73 $2.47 Women/Men 105.0% 108.7%

3.2 Other data

Here are the results broken down by scenario. The drug and family scenarios stand out for their numerically larger bonus for female panhandlers. We should avoid drawing strong conclusions from the differences here (the design and analysis were not set up to statistically compare the scenarios), but this can inform future hypotheses and studies.

Table 2. Money given by target and scenario

Drugs Ticket Family Room Men $0.75 $2.38 $2.65 $3.97 Women $0.91 $2.41 $3.27 $3.81 Women/Men 121.0% 101.4% 123.5% 96.0%

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4. Discussion

4.1 Hypotheses

Let’s evaluate the two hypotheses in light of the results.

Hypothesis 1: People will be more willing to give money to female panhandlers.

While the money offered to female panhandlers in this study was numerically larger, this finding was not statistically significant. In other words, the statistical analysis determined that these findings were not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis that there is no effect of panhandler gender on people’s willingness to give, and thus these results do not provide support for Hypothesis 1. This is not changed by the apparent difference between scenarios (two of the four scenarios, drugs and family, appeared to have a larger bonus for women) because the hypothesis did not distinguish between scenarios, and because the analysis was not set up to statistically compare scenarios. However, this apparent difference between scenarios can inform the design and hypotheses of a future study.

Hypothesis 2: The disparity will be larger among feminists than non-feminists.

Although the bonus for female panhandlers was numerically larger among feminists than non-feminists (8.7% vs. 5.0%), this result was not statistically significant, and thus these results do not provide support for Hypothesis 2.

4.2 Limitations

Compared to the U.S. population, this sample skewed young and politically left-leaning. Also, hypothetical willingness to give to a description of a panhandler does not necessarily reflect real-life behaviour. Real-life panhandler encounters plausibly involve greater frugality, as well as stronger emotional responses (positive and negative).

4.3 Future research

A follow-up could test the hypothesis that female panhandlers get more support than male panhandlers when children or family are evoked. The family scenario exhibited a numerically larger bonus for women, and there are independent reasons to think that “women and children” as a unit evoke special concern and sympathy.

Different ways of describing the panhandler could also be explored. In the four descriptions used here, the cardboard sign and its message took up much more space than the age and gender of the panhandler (in terms of number of words), even though in real life their physical characteristics (like age and gender) would probably be more salient than the words on their sign. Perhaps there would be a a greater effect of panhandler gender if the descriptions made gender a primary rather than secondary focus.

More thought should also be given to making the experiment more realistic, including probably a limit that’s lower than $10. This resulted in an average of ~$2.50, which is not a realistic average of panhandler earnings from each person who passes by.

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5. Conclusion

This survey-based study did not find reliable evidence that people are more likely to give money to female panhandlers than male ones, or that feminists exhibit a larger disparity than non-feminists. However, it did give hints to worthwhile areas of future research, including if evoking children/family benefits female panhandlers more than male ones.

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6. Appendix

Here is the ANOVA table of the mixed effects model. The three fixed effects were panhandler gender (man, woman), participant gender (man, woman), and feminist status (feminist, non-feminist).

Type III Analysis of Variance Table with Satterthwaite's method Sum Sq Mean Sq NumDF DenDF F value Pr(>F) target 2.1298 2.1298 1 362.06 0.5650 0.4527 gender 0.6163 0.6163 1 119.00 0.1635 0.6867 feminist 2.6121 2.6121 1 119.00 0.6930 0.4068 target:gender 1.5987 1.5987 1 362.13 0.4241 0.5153 target:feminist 0.2970 0.2970 1 362.03 0.0788 0.7791 gender:feminist 6.3587 6.3587 1 119.00 1.6869 0.1965 target:gender:feminist 0.0215 0.0215 1 362.25 0.0057 0.9398

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7. Revisions

In the interests of transparency, I am documenting (in reverse chronological order) any nontrivial changes that I made to this page since it was first posted.

The initial mixed effects analysis mistakenly provided simple effects (rather than main effects) due to defaults in R and the use of summary() . I have switched to summarizing the mixed effects model with anova() , which provides main effects as desired. I have also excluded from the analysis the one person who identified their gender as “other”. In all, these revisions did not change the results.