Where Can Women Do What? A Quantitative Analysis of the Gender Gap in World Christianity

The central role of women in Christian communities worldwide is undeniable. Scholars have stated for decades that women are “more religious” than men. The Pew Research Center’s “Gender Gap in Religion Around the World” study reported that Christian women have higher rates of church attendance, prayer, and religious self-identification, attesting to a perennial female majority in congregations and gender imbalances in religious belief and practice. As it pertains to African Christianity, Kenyan theologian Philomena Mwaura stated that “the Church in Africa has a feminine face and owes much of its tremendous growth to the agency of women.” The point of departure is that women have been the most active participants in Christianity across time and place. And yet, women’s contributions to church and society are often elided from history and sidelined today. Little quantitative data exist on women in World Christianity to identify the persistent gap between their participation and recognition, critical for addressing the unrelenting gender inequalities in churches worldwide. This paper presents findings from a recent project titled, “Women in World Christianity: Global Perspectives on Christian Participation,” which aims to measure the gendered gap between membership and participation in churches worldwide.

This paper builds on my most recent project, “Women in World Christianity: A Mixed-Methods Study of Gender in the World’s Largest Religion” (2019–2021), which produced my latest book, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell 2023). The results of the project essentially replicated the Pew Research Center’s gender and religion study, both studies reporting that World Christianity is 52% female by self-identification. The study revealed that localized, ethnographic, and qualitative research on Christianity identifies a significant gap when analyzed through a gendered lens. For example, while a government census might report that Presbyterians in a country are 52% female, reporting from the Presbyterians themselves is typically much higher, perhaps upward of 70% female. While this project was innovative and shed light on an understudied topic, it was only an initial step toward centering women’s experiences in the grand narrative of World Christianity.

Like women’s history, engaging in sociological research on women requires new perspectives, methods, and sources to identify the deeper level of their commitment to faith and service. My first women in World Christianity project utilized standard methods in the demography of religion to report women’s share of congregational membership worldwide. However, this approach captured the reality that men and women tend to both be members of congregations, but women report incredibly higher levels of participation than men. My current project further nuances that dynamic by creating a new Christian Participation Index (CPI) that identifies key areas of congregational life and the gendered differences in participation in them. The CPI allows for analysis at the country level to compare differences between men and women in the following variables: church attendance, prayer, importance of religion, supernatural beliefs, Christian share of the country’s population, women’s share of the Christian population, women’s opportunities for pastoral leadership, and women’s opportunities for other forms of church leadership. Data from the CPI can also be compared to the national situation to see where in the world women have more rights or opportunities in the churches than in general society, and where they have less. Such information can be applied contextually to address the gendered dynamics of church life and interrogate unequal social norms that perpetuate women’s overlooked status in churches and societies worldwide.

Without high-quality comprehensive quantitative data on women around the world, it is difficult to know what problems exist and how they can be addressed. While women make up the majority of church members, they are often excluded from holding official leadership positions and their ministries are considered secondary to those led by men. This project aims to identify these dynamics, scrutinize why they exist, and share how women respond to them. Results from this project will help address power imbalances that dictate “men’s roles” and “women’s roles” in churches and shed light on the biases that exist therein. While social norms are extremely difficult to change, in many cases communities lack the information to think or act differently. Having high-quality, relevant data on gender in congregational life, especially from the global South, will help speak to the active barriers that sustain gender inequalities in faith communities.

This paper will present the assumptions and theories undergirding this project, methods used to create this dataset, preliminary findings, and areas for future potential sociological and quantitative research on women in World Christianity.