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Facebook (FB, +1.51%) founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatric resident at the University of California San Francisco, donated $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation last week to help control the spread of Ebola. Almost as exciting as the donation was the inclusion of Chan’s name. Just a decade—or even five years ago—it may have been missing from the announcement.
In recent years, studies have dispelled myths about women and charitable giving. Debra Mesch, the director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute (WPI) at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, says misconceptions—like that women don’t give big donations and that women have to ask a man, such as their husbands, before they can give money—still abound. But WPI has found that in almost every income bracket, women give more than men.