Hope on Remand life after college

The Non-Profit as Female

Dan Pallotta, the author of Uncharitable, posits in an article on The Daily Beast that non-profits face - among other things - trouble due to "gendering".  It's a sometimes opaque article, and Pallotta is talking mostly to insiders - people who work in the world of NPOs.

Pallotta expects, implicitly, that readers know the following before they read this article:

1. Donors these days are sophisticated: instead of just writing a check at Christmas to whatever humanitarian organization sends the nicest mailing, many if not most donors are trained (one might even say, conditioned) to look for certain indicators that an NPO is worthy of a donation.  The biggest of these is the percentage of overhead a charity has: that is, what the charity spends on administrative expenses (salaries, keeping the lights on, etc.) and fund raising.
2. Non-profits reveal their various financial information through three sources: the 990, which is the official IRS tax filing a charity must submit each year; the financial summary in the charity's annual report; and the audited financial statement, which serves as a supplement to the 990.
3. The salaries of non-profit workers are, as a general rule, much lower than those of their for-profit counterparts.

Pallotta's argument - that charities are treated as "female" while the for-profit world is treated as "male" - is a provocative one.  Certainly the idea that anyone who makes money from charity work must be evil still holds sway in the public mind: when asking people to sign a petition to stop government funding cuts from the NPO where I work, I was repeatedly told that instead of stealing money from the government, we should first cut the salaries of everyone in the organization.

Pallotta would indicate that this sentiment - don't you dare make money by doing charity work - is part of what holds back the NPO world:

Consider: The for-profit sector is free to pay competitive wages based on the value people produce, yet it’s considered unseemly for anyone to make money in charity. This forces our brightest young men and women to choose between doing well and doing good, and drives most of them, burdened by student debt, into for-profit careers.

I have to segue for a minute here.  I'm lucky, in a sense.  Due to the extraordinary generosity of my parents I'm not struggling under a mountain of student debt.  However, because I have chosen to do good rather than do well, I still live at home.  I cannot - even were I to have roommates - afford to live independently in a relatively safe neighborhood.  My paycheck simply will not cover rent, gas for the car, food, work-appropriate clothing, and the medical expenses my insurance company doesn't cover.  These complaints are echoed by myriad young NPO employees who after a year or two will move on to either the most profitable sectors of the non-profit world (health care, usually) or into the for-profit world.