WAPO on The Recent Explosive Growth of the Nonprofit Sector

Andrew Van Dam, Wapo's resident statistician, has an interesting column out in last Sunday's paper.  He describes the explosive growth of the nonprofit sector, complete with lots of good numbers and charts.  

Over the past 15 years, nonprofit employment has grown 33 percent, dwarfing the 9 percent job growth enjoyed by the for-profit private sector over that time. Nonprofits have passed local government to become the second-largest source of employment in the country, behind the for-profit sector. 

 

. . . 

Women are about twice as likely to work at nonprofits as their male peers, and nonprofits have the smallest wage gaps of any sector. The typical woman at a nonprofit makes about 88 percent as much each hour as her male counterpart, a huge improvement over the 80 percent she’d earn in the for-profit sector, and effectively tied with the 87 percent she’d make in the federal government.  As a rule, the more educated and older you are, the more likely you are to have a nonprofit job. Having an advanced degree makes you three times likelier to do nonprofit work than your friends who didn’t make it past high school.

darryll k. jones