The gender gap in attendance at religious services has been narrowing as the rate of the number of women attending church has been declining faster than the number of men, according to a new study.
Between 1972 and 1974, approximately 36 percent of women and 26 percent of men reported weekly attendance to religious services, revealing a 10-point gap, according to an analysis by the Pew Research center of the General Social Survey (GSS). The gap widened to 13 points in the mid-1980s, after which it began to shrink in the coming decade through the 90s.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, the overall weekly attendance at church services declined in the United States. However, the rate of decline was faster among women. By 2012, 28 percent of women and 22 percent of men reported attending church services weekly, revealing a six-point gender gap.
David McClendon, a research associate at the Pew Research Center, poses several possible reasons for this trend seen in the decline in women’s church attendance.
One theory he poses is increased participation of women in the labor force, as scholars have found that women in the labor force attend church services less often that their counterparts who are not a part of the labor force. However, McClendon notes that “the fastest increase in women’s full-time employment during this period occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time the gender gap on religious service attendance actually widened somewhat.” He also mentions that worship attendance declined for women who were both inside and outside the labor force.
Another possible explanation McClendon suggests is the higher rates of educational achievement among women. However, he notes that “college-educated and less-educated women attended religious services at similar rates and both experienced declines in recent decades.”
Finally, he points out the growth of the “nones,” or those who claim to be religiously unaffiliated, a category which reveals a more rapid growth rate for women than for men.
Patricia Miller, a Washington D.C.-based journalist, offers another explanation, looking at the way “that women’s church attendance began to decline are the very years when religious leaders in the Catholic Church and the evangelical movement fused religion with the culture wars.”
"Women's attendance dropped noticeably between about 2004 and 2012, while men's remained fairly stable. This period saw evangelicals taking an increasingly hard line about traditional 'Catholic' issues like birth control, which may have alienated some women,” she added.
Across different religious groups, the gender gap is considerably larger among Christians with more women attending worship services than men. According to a different Pew Research Center study, there are “no countries where Christian men are significantly more likely than Christian women to attend services weekly.”
