NOW's Membership and Budget Are Grossly Overinflated

Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 by John Berlau, Jamie Dettmer

For years Patricia Ireland's National Organization for Women (NOW) has trumpeted that it runs on an annual $10 million budget and has 250,000 members. As a result of that membership and budget it claims to be the pre-eminent women's group in the country. But it would seem that NOW's financial claims are phony, according to the organization's tax returns since 1996.

Thanks to the breakaway Dulles, Va., NOW chapter; which applied to the IRS for NOW's 501(c) filings, the grossly inflated budget figures are being exposed. The filings revealed that NOW never has enjoyed a $10 million budget and that in 1999 its revenue was less than $5 million -- to be precise, $4,492,112. Its best recent year was in 1996 when annual revenue stood at $5,555,851.

Furthermore, the filings reveal that the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- NOW sided with then-president Bill Clinton -- was not good for the organization, which experienced a $660,000 drop in revenue.

"From speeches to conferences to brochures to Websites, NOW leaders were effortlessly able to convince a cooperative media, scores of unsuspecting members, the general public and even envious competitors that the organization was indeed a 250,000-member, $10 million force to reckon with," says Marie-Jose Ragab of the Dulles chapter, which broke from the main organization over the Lewinsky scandal.

According to Ragab, NOW's financial and membership information has been closely guarded but the subject of much internal curiosity. "For other than the four national officers and their handful of devotees, NOW members, local leaders and many national-board appointees are studiously kept believing in the falsified figures lest the truth demoralize them into abandoning ship," she says.

Concerning the membership numbers, it is difficult to know if NOW is telling the troth but, according to Ragab, most local leaders sense that the publicized numbers are far from accurate. "Whether NOW carries 90,000, 50,000 or 125,000 members is next to irrelevant in a population of almost 300 million, particularly when a membership has proved as notoriously passive as NOW's," says Ragab. "The problem is not about fudging membership figures a bit -- most membership-based groups do that -- the problem is the degree to which these so-called women leaders conspire to deceive the public for stardom and money."

The filings suggest that NOW's top leaders enjoy pretty good incomes and lifestyles. The salaries of the top five, including Ireland, are at the level of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Ireland receives $143,252 for a 34-hour workweek. All five top officers also receive generous expense accounts and travel allowances.