Why are Women more Religious than Men?
Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce
Abstract
Women are more religious than men. Despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them. Women also dominate the world of ‘New Age’ spirituality and are far more superstitious than men. This book reviews the now-sizeable body of social research to consider if the gender gap in religion is indeed universal. It critiques competing explanations of such differences as we find. It concludes that the gender gap is not the result of biology but is rather ... More
Women are more religious than men. Despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them. Women also dominate the world of ‘New Age’ spirituality and are far more superstitious than men. This book reviews the now-sizeable body of social research to consider if the gender gap in religion is indeed universal. It critiques competing explanations of such differences as we find. It concludes that the gender gap is not the result of biology but is rather the consequence of important social differences — responsibility for managing birth, child‐rearing and death, for example, and attitudes to the body, illness and health — over‐lapping and reinforcing each other. In the West, the gender gap is exaggerated because the social changes that undermined the plausibility of religion bore most heavily on men first. Where the lives of men and women become more similar, and where religious indifference grows, the gender gap gradually disappears.
Keywords:
gender,
religion,
difference,
universal,
birth,
death,
illness,
health
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199608102 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608102.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Marta Trzebiatowska, author
Lecturer in Sociology, University of Aberdeen
Steve Bruce, author
Professor of Sociology, University of Aberdeen
More
Less
