New research sheds light on why women are more religious than men

Women proceed to outnumber men in religious belief and practice across most societies, even when the religion promotes traditional gender roles that limit their social, economic and legal freedoms.

That paradox is explored in latest research by Professor Sascha Becker of the University of Warwick, alongside co-authors Jeanet Sinding Bentzen from the University of Copenhagen and Chun Chee Kok from the Université Catholique de Louvain.

The study, called Gender and Religion: A Survey, appears within the Journal of Demographic Economics, and comes at a moment of symbolic significance for Christianity with the Church of England appointing its first female Archbishop of Canterbury.

It synthesises a long time of research from economics, sociology and psychology to look at two linked questions: why women are more religious than men, and the way religion shapes women’s lives socially and economically.

Drawing on survey data from all over the world, the authors confirm a consistent pattern: women tend greater than men to discover with a spiritual tradition, to hope recurrently, and to explain faith as central to their every day lives. This holds across countries, cultures and most major faiths.

“However, patterns of participation differ across religious contexts: while women attend worship services more incessantly than men in predominantly Christian societies, the reverse tends to carry in Muslim and Jewish contexts,” they said. 

The increased likelihood of Christian women to interact in prayer could also be all the way down to “women’s greater emotional expressiveness and caregiving roles”. 

The study reviews a big selection of explanations proposed over time, certainly one of them specializing in economic roles. Research from the Seventies suggested that religious participation was historically tied to the domestic sphere, where women spent more time.

Evidence from more moderen time-use data points to lower levels of non secular practice amongst women who work outside the house, narrowing — but not eliminating — the gender gap.

Another explanation centres on attitudes to risk. As early because the seventeenth century, philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that belief in God was a rational alternative since it carried no downside if incorrect and infinite reward if right.

Modern research finds women, on average, to be more risk-averse than men, which can make religious belief more appealing.

Religious communities also operate as a social safety net, buffering individuals against economic and private shocks.

A 3rd perspective highlights what they call “compensation for deprivation”. In societies where women face barriers to status, employment or public influence, religious communities can provide meaning, recognition and leadership opportunities otherwise denied to them.

The authors point to historical cases, including early Twentieth-century Korea, where women’s involvement in Christian leadership was linked to higher female participation in education and public life.

Other explanations relate to life-cycle and social patterns like pregnancy, childbirth and caregiving which are sometimes related to deeper religious engagement, while women’s longer life expectancy means they’re more heavily represented in older, more religious age groups.

Gender gaps were found to narrow in step with degrees of modernisation, secularisation, and gender equality. But, the paper finds, the “gap doesn’t vanish entirely – even in highly secular countries women remain more religious than men”.

“Potential socialization effects are also evident in how religiosity changes with marital status: studies often find that married women are more religious than single women, possibly because marriage and motherhood elevate the social expectation of non secular involvement (being a ‘good mother’ could also be viewed as aligning with raising children religiously),” the study said. 

The authors also highlight the role of “secular competition”: men usually tend to substitute religious participation with non-religious communal activities — comparable to sport or social clubs — particularly when these compete with time traditionally dedicated to worship.

Beyond explaining religious participation, the second half of the paper examines how religion itself affects women’s outcomes.

The researchers deal with studies that use rigorous empirical methods — comparable to natural experiments, policy changes and randomised interventions — to isolate the results of faith from broader cultural or economic aspects.

The evidence shows that religion continues to influence a big selection of outcomes for ladies and girls. These include access to education, marital timing, participation within the labour market, reproductive rights, fertility, and even whether female children are born in societies with strong preferences for sons.

Religious ideas also shape laws and public policy, either directly through doctrine or not directly through their influence on lawmakers. The impact, nevertheless, shouldn’t be uniform, meaning religion can either reinforce inequality or turn out to be a force for ladies’s empowerment.

They document cases where religious movements supported women’s advancement, comparable to early Protestant campaigns to advertise literacy so that each one believers could read scripture. At the alternative extreme, Taliban rule in Afghanistan is an example of faith getting used to justify the exclusion of girls and girls from education altogether.

The study also notes a generational shift. The gap between men’s and girls’s religiosity is largest amongst older generations and appears to be narrowing amongst younger adults in Australia, Europe and North America.

In these countries, young men have gotten more religious while young women are disengaging from organised religion.

Some of this variation has been linked to the expansion of congregations promoting highly patriarchal ideas of masculinity and types of Christian nationalism.

Professor Becker said, “An vital query on which evidence is simply starting to emerge is whether or not the gender gap will close as societies modernise and secularise – or will deeper aspects proceed to attract women to faith?

He continued, “Women’s participation in formal employment, their reproductive rights, and their legal rights and responsibilities are still shaped openly by religious teachings and not directly through the influence of religion on legislators.

“Against this background it’s clearly a puzzle that girls are, on average, more religious than men despite most religions promoting and entrenching patriarchal norms which impose significant costs and burdens upon them.”

He added, “While the research we reviewed offers partial explanations, no single theory or study explains this paradox.”