Volunteering in civil society organizations (CSOs) is sometimes idealized as welcoming arena for everybody. Prior research, however, has shown that participation in volunteer work depends on gender, wealth, education, and social networks, suggesting that CSOs are not in fact open to everyone. Inequality within different fields of volunteering combined with the factors that put actors into more powerful positions has rarely been scrutinized. Besides identifying the characteristics and resources relevant for promotion, we primarily investigate how these patterns differ between four subfields: politics, social services, religion, and sports. We analyzed a large database created from the Austrian micro-census. The findings reveal significant relations between the actors’ gender, their occupational and educational status, and their hierarchical positions in CSOs within each of the subfields. Our results indicate that the extent to which social inequality spills over to volunteering depends on field characteristics: In the fields of sports and politics, occupational status plays a major role, while in the fields of religion and social services, educational status is more important. We explain these differences through organizational and individual factors that characterize these social fields.

民间社会组织（CSO）中的志愿服务有时被理想化为所有人的欢迎场所。但是，先前的研究表明，参与志愿者工作取决于性别，财富，教育和社交网络，这表明公民社会组织实际上并不向所有人开放。很少对志愿服务不同领域内的不平等现象以及将演员置于更重要位置的因素进行审查。除了确定与促销相关的特征和资源外，我们主要研究这些模式在四个子领域之间的差异：政治，社会服务，宗教和体育。我们分析了一个由奥地利微观人口普查创建的大型数据库。调查结果揭示了演员的性别，他们的职业和教育程度之间的重要关系，以及它们在每个子域中的CSO中的层次结构位置。我们的结果表明，社会不平等蔓延到志愿服务的程度取决于领域特征：在体育和政治领域，职业地位起主要作用，而在宗教和社会服务领域，教育地位更为重要。我们通过表征这些社会领域的组织因素和个人因素来解释这些差异。