The philanthropy world will regret sidelining women

Erica Wertheim, Tribune News Service

Two major American universities were asked to do one thing after my mother died in April: acknowledge her passing.

The foundation she co-created nearly 50 years ago, the Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation, had given hundreds of millions of dollars to higher education, much of it to the University of Florida and UC Berkeley. Both universities refused, failing even to issue a press release to mark her passing.

UC Berkeley initially had a tribute written and ready to publish — but an administrator decided it was only “fair and transparent” to consult her ex-husband first. That would be my father, the man she chose to divorce after 55 years of marriage. The tribute was never published.

The University of Florida said it wanted to be “responsive” but also needed to consult my father first. It then declined entirely, citing vague legal considerations it has never specified. By contrast, the following month, the university hosted an 87th birthday party for my father, transforming the lobby of the Wertheim UF Scripps Institute — in a building my mother helped pay for — into “Herbie’s Yacht Club” for the lavish event.

Why the disparity? Presumably because after my parents’ divorce a year and a half ago, universities that had received their largesse were angling for more by trying to remain in the good graces of my father, who now controls the foundation. Never mind that the simple principled action would have been to acknowledge the passing of one of the most significant donors in their institutional histories.

Nicole Wertheim was a builder. Beginning in 1977, she and my father used earnings from their growing business to establish the Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation. “We were both very hard-working, and we had nothing,” she said in a 2019 interview. “We just wanted to build something together.” My mother was not a passive figure in this work. Her name was on the foundation itself, the gift agreements and the legal contracts that formalised every major gift. The word “family” in the foundation’s name was not decorative. It was a declaration of intent — her declaration — that what she and my father built would grow across generations. She gave as a full participant in creating that wealth. She was not a plus-one.

Ignoring her death is part of a pattern in American philanthropy that I call institutional infidelity: the minimising and quiet reassignment of a woman’s philanthropic identity to her husband. The betrayal rarely announces itself. It accumulates through small, compounding decisions, particularly in periods of conflict such as divorce — and at death. Communications are quietly rerouted. Deference is recalibrated. Visibility reassigned.

The ethical problem is straightforward. Philanthropic gifts made by couples are the result of joint effort, joint capital and joint commitment. When institutions accept those gifts, they enter into a relationship with two people. That obligation does not dissolve if the marriage does. What happened to my mother reflects something larger than one family’s experience. The institutions that maintain relationships with philanthropists have a structural blindness about who is actually driving charitable giving, and that blindness is going to prove costly.

Research from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy finds that women now influence or make 85% of a family’s philanthropy-related decisions and are more likely than men of equivalent means to give at all. Development offices that structure their relationships primarily around the male partner are not simply being inequitable; they are misreading their own donor base. Apparently the implications of MacKenzie Scott’s example have not fully landed. During her marriage to Jeff Bezos, Scott was among the least publicly visible figures in American philanthropy despite her foundational role in Amazon’s early years. Since their 2019 divorce, she has donated more than $26 billion, averaging more than $5 billion annually, which makes her one of the most consequential philanthropists in American history. Her giving in 2025 alone surpassed Bezos’ total lifetime charitable contributions.

Scott is an exceptional case in scale. The dynamic she represents, however, repeats across American giving at every level of wealth. This is where philanthropy’s ethical failure and its institutional self-interest meet. By 2030, McKinsey projects that women will control approximately $34 trillion of wealth transfer expected from baby boomers. They will inherit from aging parents and, in most heterosexual couples, from husbands they outlive. They are already the primary or equal decision-makers in the vast majority of high-net-worth philanthropic households.

Women who become widows are about three times as likely as the average household to change their financial adviser, reflecting how poorly institutions have cultivated relationships with women as independent principals rather than as half of a couple. Philanthropy is making the same mistake when they signal that a woman’s standing derives from her husband’s.

The remedies are straightforward. Gift agreements involving couples should require both signatures, conferring equal legal standing to both parties. Development offices should maintain independent, equal communication with both donors regardless of marital status and must not quietly redirect that communication if divorce is initiated or if control of the foundation shifts to one party. These are not radical standards. They are the minimum that a serious legal and financial relationship requires.