Are Women More Spiritual and Men More Religious?

A survey on spirituality paints a bleak picture about the gender gap

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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I always like surveys that take a look at religion in a way that’s just a bit different than what we are used to. That’s certainly the case with the Fetzer Institute’s National Religion and Spirituality Survey. There's actually one section where folks are asked to draw an image of what spirituality looks like. I have never heard of that approach, but I have to admit that I was intrigued to see what people came up with.

When I was in San Diego a few weeks ago for a meeting for the Templeton Grant that Tony Jones and I received, one of the participants showed us a handful of the actual images that were created by participants in the Fetzer survey. The most likely image conjured? A mountain. I will let you all talk that through in the comments, because I am sure it means something different to each of you.

I am not going to be analyzing drawings for the post today, just those traditional survey questions like I have done in a previous post. But there’s a new angle here worth some exploration - gender. One regular reader, Spouting Thomas, wrote in the comments of that previous post:

[There’s] a stereotype is that "spiritual, not religious" is a highly female-coded worldview, just as atheism is more male-coded. I wish that could have been tested here.

That’s a fantastic idea that needs to be sorted out. So, I am going to take a lot of those questions in the Spirituality Survey and try to figure out how large the gender gap is in areas like beliefs and spiritual practices. But before I begin, I wanted to point readers to this great work by Landon Schnabel about the gender differences in religion. This sentence summarizes his findings well, “I demonstrate that women are generally more religious, but less dogmatic.”

Okay - let’s start with a really nice baseline question about how respondents feel about their belief in a higher power. The question here is a pretty close copy of a question from the General Social Survey which has proven to do a reasonably good job of providing a good array of response options.

A majority of female respondents in the sample say that they believe in God without any doubts - 55%. Men are much lower than that, only 43% express a certain belief. So, where do those 12 percent of men end up if they aren’t ‘certain believers’? They are clearly much more likely to choose one of the last three response options.

• They are twice as likely to say they doubt God more than the believe in God (6% vs 3%).

• They are five points more likely to say that they believe in some Higher Power (15% vs 10%).

• They are much more likely to say that they don’t believe in God (9% vs 4%).

I think it’s fair to say on this one metric, women are much more spiritual/religious than their male counterparts.

In another set of questions, folks are asked to rate their spirituality on a range from ‘not at all’ to ‘very.’ They are asked to do the same when it comes to ‘how religious are you?’ I created heatmaps of responses for both men and women in the sample.

In some parts of these heatmaps, there aren’t a lot of differences. For instance, in both cases the most likely response option was moderately spiritual and moderately religious. That’s 22-24% of each gender. And the bottom right hand side of each map is pretty much the same, too. That’s people who say that they are fairly religious, but not so spiritual.

There are some big differences in specific squares, though. Look at the top right one - that’s very spiritual and very religious. About 11% of women say that this describes them; it’s only 6% of men. In fact, 44% of women put themselves in the top right quadrant compared to only 36% of men. And almost all that difference is due to that one box in the top right.

The bottom right box (not at all spiritual/not at all religious) encompasses 17% of the entire male sample, it’s only 7% of women. About 43% of men are in the bottom left four squares. Just 28% of women can be found in those same four boxes.

To go back to the comment that started this investigation - I don’t know if it’s true that women tend to be more spiritual. I think women tend to be both more spiritual AND more religious than men. At least that seems to be the clear conclusion from this heatmap.

The survey also asked people, ‘to what extent do you feel connected to a higher power?’ Again, that gender gap shows up.

Men are nearly twice as likely as women to say that they feel ‘not at all’ connected to a higher power compared to women (23% vs 12%). They are also more likely to respond ‘slightly connected’ - 22% vs 18%. In total, 45% of men chose the bottom two options compared to 30% of women.

In contrast, 40% of women say that they felt ‘highly connected to a higher power’ it was just 26% of men. It’s pretty interesting how men’s responses are almost evenly distributed across the four options and women’s are clearly much more tilted to the right side of the graph. Women are, without a doubt, more likely to express a stronger connection a higher power than men in this data.

How about moving beyond just belief questions and focus on activities that could be seen as spiritual. The Fetzer survey has a really nice battery of a bunch of possible actions that could have a spiritual component to them ranging from attending religious services to doing yoga/karate. I calculated the share of each gender who reported that they had engaged in each activity at least once in the previous week.

Well, I think there’s a clear conclusion from this big battery of questions - women are much more likely to engage in these activities compared to men. In fact, there’s not a single activity in this battery of 17 total in which men are clearly more engaged compared to women. The only ones that come close are: acts of protest, fasting, tarot/fortune telling, making an offering, or teaching in a religious setting. But in no case are men more than one percent more likely than women to engage in that act over the prior week.

There are a number of cases in which women are much more engaged. They include acts of service, art, attending religious services, being in nature, meditation, prayer, reading, and studying of religious texts. If I get any impression from this data, it’s simply this - women just do a lot more stuff than men do.

Let me give you just one more little piece of data here at the end that may muddy the narrative just a little bit. People were asked, ‘how often do you have doubts about your religious or spiritual beliefs.’ The response options ranged from ‘never’ to ‘always.’

You know what, I don’t really see a big gender gap on this one. About a third of men and a third of women say that they never have doubts about their beliefs and nearly the same share say that they seldom doubt. In fact, I don’t know if there’s any real gender gap when it comes to doubt. Eleven percent of men say that they doubt ‘nearly always’ or ‘always.’ About 9% of women gave the same response.

But even with this last bit of analysis being considered, I think it’s fair to say that women are just much more spiritual and religious compared to men. They are a dozen points more likely to report a certain belief in God compared to men. They are nearly twice as likely to say that they are very spiritual and very religious compared to men. Men are ten points more likely to be not at all spiritual and not at all religious compared to women. When it comes to spiritual acts, there’s just no comparison. Women are way more involved in spiritually adjacent actions compared to men.

Of course, there’s been a spate of recent data that points to an opposite conclusion - that younger women are less religious (using more traditional metrics) compared to men. They are more likely to report no religious affiliation and less likely to indicate regular religious attendance.

But maybe that’s the key distinction - women express their spirituality and religiosity in ways that are not fully captured by the traditional measures used on surveys. The types of questions offered by Fetzer’s study may be really advancing our understanding of the gendered differences in religion and spirituality.

While this data focuses specifically on religion, spirituality, and gender in the United States - there’s a good report from Pew that was published in 2016 about these differences around the world. There’s some pretty interesting findings in there like Christian women are more likely to attend religious services compared to Christian men, but the opposite is true among Muslims and Orthodox Jews.

This is the joy of social science - we are always uncovering new ways to understand the world around us.

Code for this post can be found here.