Volunteerism among Older Women

About one out of every four women (42-56 years old) does some volunteer work. The women volunteers average 24 weeks per year and during their weeks of volunteerism, they average 6 hours per week in this activity.

As with the older men, these averages hide a wide range of variability in the number of weeks women volunteer. Over one-quarter o-f the women volunteers participate almost every week in this activity; over 20 percent participated between 17 and 48 weeks in a year and at the other extreme, over a third of the volunteers participate for 4 or fewer weeks in this activity.

There is little variability in the number of hours spent volunteering. Two-thirds of the women spend between 2 and 7 hours per week in volunteer activities.

Relatively few older women volunteer continually: fewer than 15 percent volunteer year after years. Looking at it another way, fewer than 56 percent of those who volunteer-in one year are women who have volunteered more than once in the past.

The type of organization for which women volunteer changes as they age. Twenty-eight percent of those 37-51 volunteered in schools or for groups such as Boy Scouts’ or Girl Scouts; one-third of the volunteers did church-related work; another 30 percent did volunteer work for hospitals, clinics, major community drives (such as the Heart Fund), and for other civic or social welfare causes. Women volunteers had changed their pattern of volunteering by ages 42 to 56. There was a shift away from volunteer work for schools, Boy and Girl Scouts (to less than 20 percent), and into church-related activities (to over 40 percent) as will as into work for hospi¬tals, clinics, community drives, and other civic and social welfare activities (to over 30 percent).