Christian Women More Religious Than Men, Pew Survey Finds

By Stoyan Zaimov, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, March 24, 2016

Participants pray for Canadian Pastor Hyeon Soo Lim who is being held in North Korea during a joint multi-cultural prayer meeting at Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Toronto, December 20, 2015. Canadian diplomats were allowed to meet detained pastor Lim on Friday, after he was sentenced to life in prison in North Korea earlier last week, and found him in good spirits and health, a church spokeswoman said on Sunday. | (Photo: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang)

A major Pew Research Center analysis on the gender gap in religious belief around the world has found that Christian women tend to be more religious then men in virtually all criteria, while Muslim men score higher than women on some accounts.

"On all the standard measures of religious commitment examined in the study, Christian women are more religious than Christian men," Pew reports this week.

"By contrast, Muslim women and Muslim men show similar levels of religiousness on all measures of religious commitment except frequency of attendance at worship services. Because of religious norms, Muslim men attend services at a mosque much more often than Muslim women do."

The statistics showed that among Christians, 53 percent of women attend church weekly, compared to 46 percent of men. What is more, women also scored higher than men when it came to daily prayer, how important they find religion, their belief in Heaven, Hell, and angels.

Muslim men and women scored virtually equal numbers in the above-mentioned categories, except for weekly attendance — while 70 percent of Muslim men attend services weekly, only 42 percent of women can say the same.

On a global scale among all religions, women held the advantage, and in 61 out of 192 countries women were at least 2 percentage points more likely than men to have a religious affiliation. In all other counties, there was no notable gender gab, and not a single country reported more religiously affiliated men than women by 2 percentage points or more.

Similar gender gap surveys have found that Christian women are more religious than men on a number of occasions, with a January 2015 survey by the UCL Institute of Education reporting that while 54 percent of British men in their 40s identified as either atheists or agnostics, women were twice more likely to believe in God and life after death.

"Among believers, women are also much more likely to be definite than men, and among non-believers, men are much more likely to be definite than women," said at the time David Voas, professor of population studies at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

Pew noted that scholars of religions have long been studying the possible reasons for this notable gender gap in religious belief, and have come up with different theories, including "biology, psychology, genetics, family environment, social status, workforce participation and a lack of 'existential security' felt by many women because they generally are more afflicted than men by poverty, illness, old age and violence."

The analysis offered that there is a consensus that different factors create this gender gap, but there is no agreement in which factors are the most responsible for it.