Why are Women more Religious than Men?

If in fact it’s true (anything that has long been known has good chances of being false), it’s possibly due to neurological differences. Brain centers activated by relgious activity are related to a capacity for empathy. The same centers are activated by the drug ecstasy. Give the neuroscientists another 20 years and the matter should be clearer. And of course the genes controlling the development of these centers will be identified sooner or later.

On the other hand there is no difference in hypnotizability.

Which suggests that religion is not a form of hypnosis.

Not bloody likely. Let’s just wait 20 years.

I always thought it was because women are, by and large, more societally insecure (and certainly more financially so), and thus more susceptible to having to take it on faith that their lot in life will improve if they devote themselves to a sky fairy.

What is meant by “religious,” and how is religiosity measured? Are women more religious than men across all religions and cultures? Or is this yet another generalization from “modern, Western and Christian” to “all cultures, everywhere, across time?”

Maybe we can turn this question on its head and ask, “Are men more likely to be atheists? If so, why?”

Nobody has blamed the patriachy yet?

I had a great-uncle on the non-LDS side who was a local politician in a backwater town in the Canadian North. He decided one day that the town needed a church, so he hassled and harrassed every citizen into donating money toward building one.

During the first Sunday afternoon’s services, someone came in on my great-uncle in the basement of the general store, playing poker and smoking cigars with his cronies, just as usual. When asked why he’d made everybody contribute to a church he wasn’t going to attend, he reminded everyone around that church was very important—for women and children.

“Religion is the opiate of the people” – and it’s a lot bigger a pain to be a woman than a man, so it’s no surprise when they use more painkillers.

Same reason a woman is more likely to ask for directions when lost.

And could I ask an obvious question….what, precisely, do we mean by religion? Or is this another question that presumes that the only ‘real’ religions are Western monotheistic religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity)? What about Shinto, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Confucianism (if that’s a religion), and so forth?

I remember seeing Jo Brand comment ruefully once that if British women had never had the vote, Labour would have won every post-1918 British election—perhaps there’s a single tendency in outlook or motivation that supports both phenomena.

Doesn’t Tyler’s question treat belief as a matter of choice? I’m not sure that someone can just choose to believe, say, that they will be reincarnated and have a second shot. Anyway, the idea that people choose beliefs to maximize their utility–in this case to match up with their risk profile–seems to be describing a species of irrationality, adapting beliefs to desires, like the story of the fox and the grapes that Elster likes to bring up. The framework of choice seems ill-suited to explain beliefs altogether.

You might want to dig down to the link at

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/12/a_kuranian_take.html

which makes this question more interesting, although you have to take the primary result “on faith” since there is not direct link to the research behind the central claim. I do remember that, at least in western societies, there is overwhelming evidence of a gender difference in religious belief – as measured from survey responses, attendance at religious services, frequency of attendance, degree of importance of religion in daily life, etc.

As far as the patriarchy is concerned, the relevant point is

“Once people admit that this gender gap exists, the most popular explanation is that women are “socialized” to be more religious. Stark and Miller put this theory to the test. If the socialization hypothesis is true, they reason, then the gender gap should be larger in more traditional societies where socialization pressure is more intense. Make sense to me.

Survey says: Dead wrong. In fact, the gender gap is smallest in the most traditional societies, and largest in the least traditional societies! In societies that approve of single motherhood, with a high abortion rate, low fertility, and high female labor force participation, the religiosity gap between women and men is especially large.”

e.g. it’s apparently universal and the most obvious cultural explanations don’t work.

So why are women more religious than men? Is it just greater risk-aversion?

There’s something beautiful about the immediacy of that statement. I just love the clarity of “difference between the sexes”->”women are inherently flawed”

“Once people admit that this gender gap exists, the most popular explanation is that women are “socialized” to be more religious. Stark and Miller put this theory to the test. If the socialization hypothesis is true, they reason, then the gender gap should be larger in more traditional societies where socialization pressure is more intense. Make sense to me.

Survey says: Dead wrong. In fact, the gender gap is smallest in the most traditional societies, and largest in the least traditional societies! In societies that approve of single motherhood, with a high abortion rate, low fertility, and high female labor force participation, the religiosity gap between women and men is especially large.”

Maybe a higher percentage of men are irreligious because most religions endorse living life contrary to some pretty powerful male instincts. In liberal societies, men have fewer social constraints standing in the way of their philandering and immoral power-grabbing. Certainly there are plenty of people of both sexes who have no place for religion in their lives, who don’t need it to enforce their moral choices. But I would suggest that there is a certain type of man who stands to lose a lot of what he desires by being religious, and that this effect is more pronounced when other societal factors don’t duplicate religious control.

“Once people admit that this gender gap exists, the most popular explanation is that women are “socialized” to be more religious. Stark and Miller put this theory to the test. If the socialization hypothesis is true, they reason, then the gender gap should be larger in more traditional societies where socialization pressure is more intense. Make sense to me.

Survey says: Dead wrong. In fact, the gender gap is smallest in the most traditional societies, and largest in the least traditional societies! In societies that approve of single motherhood, with a high abortion rate, low fertility, and high female labor force participation, the religiosity gap between women and men is especially large.”

Except in those societies EVERYONE is religious. It’d be more accurate to say that the socialization hypothesis would predict that as societies grow more liberal, the decrease in religiosity will be concentrated among those groups for whom the social pressure to be religious is the least – i.e., men.

Or to phrase it in opposite terms, of course more traditional societies have a smaller gender gap, since due to the gender gap here, most of the gains to be had in religiosity are among men.

So to be short – it’s the patriarchy.

Maybe a higher percentage of men are irreligious because most religions endorse living life contrary to some pretty powerful male instincts. In liberal societies, men have fewer social constraints standing in the way of their philandering and immoral power-grabbing.

Is there any evidence that irreligious males (or irreligious people as a whole) engage in less anti-social behavior? Certainly, the prominent example of the jihadis don’t support the idea that religion has a generally pro-social impact. But this is the case even in much more mundane areas — it turns out, for example, that atheists in the U.S. have substantially lower divorce rates than conservative Christians:

http://www.adherents.com/largecom/baptist_divorce.html

Which would seem to cast doubt on your ‘religion prevents philandering’ hypothesis.

Personally, I prefer P.J. O’Rourke’s thesis that if God had intended for us to go to church more, he’d have given us smaller brains to think with and bigger butts to sit on. And in the latter, women are, at least, better adapted to hard church pews.

“He’s the father/husband most women seek”

Care to expand that patriarchal observation with any facts?

Myself, I tend to wonder why economists will look at a group of “women” and assume that their reasons for being as they are and believing as they do will have a generalised explanation.

Richard said in response to my comment that in more traditional societies there is more pressure to conform to relgiious norms.

I keep coming across this idea that America (or the ‘modern west’) is culture-free, peopled by unsocialised ‘rational actors

I’m not American and I obviously wasn’t thinking of America as an example of a less religious society. I think, however, thet there are societies where pressures to religious conformism are weaker, and others where it is stronger.

Of course that doesn’t mean that less religious societies lack social pressures or that their citizens are necessarily more rational. Simply that in the absence of social pressure to be religious more people will be secular. I may not have spelled this out in full. I thought my comment was long enough as it was.

I tend to think that a lot of social phenomenon can be explained by the economist’s standard recourse to the cost/benefit, utility maximization framework. However I also think that there’s a good bit of cultural inertia and often times a lot of behaviors where the difference between the benefits and costs is small will survive long after the purpose they have meant to serve have ceaded to exist.

If I was gonna go with the first approach I’d want to look at how religiousity affects men’s and women’s compensation and income (these studies control for income, right? Otherwise this whole discussion is a non starter). For example maybe non-religiousness is punished less by the market in men then it is in women. Of course this just pushes the question one “why?” degree further (as does the “it’s risk aversion” explanation).

But I don’t think this is the appropriate explanation here. For Western societies I think it has more to do with the fact that traditionally the worship place was also a social place. Men would hang out with other men at work. Women would hang out with other women at church (again I’m restricting this explanation just to Western societies). Of course since those days women have entered the labor market in large numbers and the places where they socialize, now with both men and women, are hardly different then that of men. But the side effect of days gone by persists.

Of course this is all making stuff up outta thin air.

Maybe (traditionally, in many cases, etc), girls are more rewarded for deferential, submissive, obedient behavior, and so are more prepared when they grow up to accept that kind of role with respect to a Lord figure?

Or, maybe women are more often involved in child care and (so?) are more invested in modelling “virtuous” behavior for children?

“Why are Women more Religious than Men?”

Maybe they are more perceptive than men?

Christ, I can feel there will soon be a post about Rodney Stark and the wonderful Chicago school application of neo-classical models to show how rational, comparatively, christianity is as opposed to heathen religions. The west is the best, followed by other ridiculous uses of the market model. I can’t wait.

From Tyler Cowen to Gary Becker to Rodney Stark – the fundie infield is coming!

Next question is: why are economists irrationally pre-disposed to put every question in terms of rational expectation? Is it due to the risk factor, i.e, they will get kicked out of the profession if they don’t take on faith an obviously bogus paradigm?

Because it’s more interesting. You learn more if you don’t automatically assume everyone around you is a stupid irrational idiot if they ever do something you don’t understand. Sometimes there’s a good reason why someone is doing something you don’t understand.

Of course, Roger, if you are in fact smarter than everyone else around you, this doesn’t apply to you. But I don’t think you’re going to start arguing that every economist is smarter than every non-economist.

Tracy, the reason is …”Because it’s more interesting.” Wow. That is the reason people do numerology and astrology too.

The choice really isn’t between utility maximizers and idiots. Unfortunately, that is what the economics profession has convinced itself of. Actually, people have a diversity of motives – sometimes, they even believe things because they think it is true! – and they rarely make decisions in complete isolation one from the other. While it may be true you can isolate men from women in a poll, it is pretty improbable that men and women make up their views in isolation one from another in real life. John Dupre is, I think, right about the heedlessness of the belief among economists that rational expectations is the magic wand of social theory. It ain’t.

Nobody has blamed the patriachy yet?

Fine, I will. Religion is primarily a social institution and women are usually tasked in a patriarchal society to do the unpaid social work to hold that society together. Looking at it from that perspective, the issue is a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, it has a bad political side effect in that religion is the primary force behind anti-abortion efforts, so women’s greater religiosity means that larger percentages of women buy into the anti-choice movement than otherwise would.

harry, I think that’s too nice on women. I am sorry to say that I believe that higher levels of guilt and anxieties (whether innate or hormone-induced or promoted by patriarchy or a combination), and higher levels of submissiveness (definitely promoted by patriarchy) seem a more plausable answer to me…

Tracy, the reason is …”Because it’s more interesting.” Wow. That is the reason people do numerology and astrology too.

And chemistry and physics and anthropology, and etc. Personally I find economics, physics, anthropology, etc more interesting than numerology or astrology as it is possible to disprove something in one of the sciences, which makes the game tougher. Just making up something you like the sound of, as in astrology or numerology is not very interesting to me, although of course YMMV.
(Although of course there are other motivations for studying any science, or indeed numerology or astrology).

The choice really isn’t between utility maximizers and idiots. Unfortunately, that is what the economics profession has convinced itself of. Actually, people have a diversity of motives – sometimes, they even believe things because they think it is true! – and they rarely make decisions in complete isolation one from the other.

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. Having a diversity of motives and a variety of beliefs does not have any bearing on whether you are rational or not in the economics sense. (To what extent those beliefs are true and to what extent you alter them in light of new evidence does have a bearing). Nor am I aware of any economist who argues that people make decisions in complete isolation – the whole point of marginal utility theory is that the value of something can vary according to how much you already have and what you want to use it for. And of course the whole study of prices in an economy, or indeed of public choice economics, is about how decisions are made when one decision is affected by others’ decisions.

Louise Roth and Jeff Kroll considered a hypothesis as to why one group of people’s behaviour differed from another, tested it, and discarded it. What in that required assuming that people make decisions in complete isolation from one another, or that people only have one belief, or that people only have one set of motives?

This gives people who are in fact powerless the illusion that they can do something to improve their chances of getting what they want or need.

Actually, for some religious folks, religion is seen as a way of giving up power to something more powerful than yourself. Perhaps men are unwilling to let go of control (seeming control)? Maybe it’s a pride thing? The existence of God is hard to accept without humility (if you accept his existence and live like you actually accept it). Also, at least for the early rising of the Christian church, women were a huge part of its success for an important reason. They saw in the teachings of Jesus someone who saw their worth, who told them they were equal in the eyes of God. Galations 3:28 says: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Throughout history men have tried to hide that part of Jesus’ teaching, but that was not the case in the beginning and thankfully the old message is being rediscovered in more modern times as well. Perhaps that accounts for some of women’s inclination towards religion (at least towards Christianity)?

it explains why there are no atheists in foxholes

I thought we laid this to rest some months ago..?
There are, in fact, some atheists in foxholes.

Roger – rational expectations theory relates to how people form beliefs about the future. It has nothing to say about risk preferences, which the paper in question addressed.

Rational expectations theory deals with things like how I predict inflation, or share prices, or the risk of my house burning down. Risk preference relates to what I do with those predictions. Two people might have perfectly rational predictions of the risk of their house burning down over the next year, and yet differ about buying insurance due to different risk preferences. There are of course other motivations apart from risk preferences that relate to people’s actual decisions – examples within the ambiet of economics include budget constraints, indifference curves, signalling theory, etc.

Rational expectations theory is of course very important to explain how people respond/will respond to changes in the money supply. It leads to quite different results than adaptive expectations – the theory rational expectations replaced. Hyper-rational expectations leads to different results again. Personally I think inflation is not utterly trivial, but that is a value judgement and YMMV. I am not sure, however, how you believe rational expectations theory, or adaptive expectations, or hyper-rational expectations do not address people’s expectations. They are, after all, competing models of how people form expectations.

Roth and Kroll appear to have proved what you are arguing here – that risk preference does not explain religious behaviour. I am not sure therefore why you are accusing economists of trying to explain everything by one variable.
I venture to suggest though that religious behaviour is only one part of the full range of human behaviour and risk preferences may be useful in understanding other parts of human behaviour (like purchasing insurance, or doing up seatbelts, or gambling).

My hat is off to H. E. Baber. The intrepetation that explains MORE than it was called upon to deal with is always attractive but this a particularly nice fit over three areas. Is this being discussed somewhere else? I’d like to see if persuading details for or against are marshalled anywhere.

Men are, on the whole, more analytic than women, and therefore less susceptible to being mislead into worshipping fairy tales.