The survey has followed two groups of women since the late 1960s, re-interviewing them every two years, asking questions about their labor force participation, marital status, number of children and, occasionally, about their volunteer experiences. One group of women, numbering 5,000 when the survey began in 1967, were born between 1923 and 1937, while the second, similar-sized group had birthdays between 1944 and 1959. The older women were asked about volunteer participation in five surveys from 1974 to 1984, tracing the trajectory of the volunteer activities of American women in the middle span of their lives. The younger women were surveyed on volunteer participation over an 18-year span, providing a picture of volunteering as they left early adulthood, set up families and reached middle age, Wilson said. Besides allaying fears of an impending volunteer drought, the analysis revealed how volunteer participation is fitted into and around the work and home lives of women, Wilson said.
Married women are more likely to volunteer than singles.
Women volunteer less if they have pre-school children in the home, but more if their children are of school age. If mothers of young children take on full-time jobs, they seem to maintain their level of volunteering, squeezing volunteer tasks into their overall work schedules. Women volunteer most when they work 20 hours or fewer a week. Since women working more than 40 hours a week increase their volunteer time, the quality and flexibility of the job may play an important role in providing them the opportunity to help others. If the jobs that increasing numbers of women are filling are good quality positions which provide them with autonomy on the job and flexible work schedules, then the impact on volunteering will be positive.