A Kuranian Take on the Religious Gender Gap

Your argument is persuasive, but I think the risk averse argument explains more than you give it credit for. If you accept that there is a god and some type of heaven, then ambition isn’t needed for a good end result. This is the type of world a risk averse person would prefer.

Religion also tends to be highly correlated with community, so even if an equal number of men and women would believe that there is no god the cost of expressing that belief is to be isolated from that community. Being part of the community lessens risk, leaving entails taking on risk. It doesn’t take feeling vs thinking for women rather than men to chose community over what they might otherwise believe is the truth.

That action leads to belief is something that seems to be well supported by psychological literature. I’d recomend reading Cialdini’s book Influence on this topic. It is light but very informative reading. The need to for consistency leads to the women who need religion for community thinking “Why do I go to religious services? I must be a religious person.”

If you ever have the chance of being president of Harvard, Bryan, I suggest you turn it down.

There does seem to be a bit more to the risk preference hypothesis. Perhaps thikning about your Rational Irrationality in reverse could be helpful.

In this case there is a potential cost to being reflective (i.e. rational). If men are less risk averse, the discounted expected costs of losing Pascal’s wager will be lower. Hence they are more willing to expose religious beliefs to sceptical inquiry.

I’d love to see similar research on the gender gap of belief in socialist economics in societies with higher economic freedom and lower economic freedom.

(I think that belief in socialism is often a replacement for belief in the supernatural. Extreme environmentalism may be as well.)

I like Bryan’s theory a lot. I’ve pondered a similar idea in why you find libertarian women in vital positions in organizations outside academia–e.g., Virginia Postrel, Marty Zupan, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Andrea Rich, Sally Pipes, Traci Sharpe, etc.–but not in academia. They can’t hack the acrimony and bitter tension that being vitally libertarian necessarily involves in academe. Libertarianism may not be a male philosophy so much as a disagreeable one in our mainstream cultural institutions. That is why most such libertarians are disproportionately men, even making the suitable adjustments.

Leftists will portray libertarianism as male for its individualism, competitiveness, etc. But the key idea and sentiment of libertarianism is voluntarism, as opposed to coercion. In fact, coercion is more of a guy thing, so in that sense libertarianism is a female philosophy.

On this theory, genetics is not necessary all of it. It could be part culture that being womanly is being pleasant and agreeable.

I think this points to a needs-oriented solution. Women have children. They feel the need to provide for those children. Collectivization through religious affiliation provides additional help to their children.

But why do they need help? For married women, men are not a constant (mortality, divorce, etc.), so religion is a hedge. Single women compare what they can provide to what a married couple can provide, and feel poorer for the comparison, so they augment by collectivizing.

I think the responses to this issue add credence to what an old literature professor once told me: we are limited only by our imagination when trying to assess the motives of others.

I’ve pondered this before. I think it may be socially-teleological reason, but still to do with risk. A religious society is an ordered society where purity is valued. Women are likely to favour this, as they are more risk-averse. In a religious society, women can explain their refusal of men by reference to piety and the morality of the church. The tradeoff is that women will never reach positions of power in religious societies. So religion minimises risk for women, but stunts social advancement. Religion is the low-risk option.

I do not think Kuran’s preference falsification argument explains the gap between men in the traditional and advanced societies, which is what is actually going on here (men get less religious in advanced socieities, while women remain religious). My guess is that it has more to do with education, men getting it and it affecting their religiosity in advanced countries, while women do not lose religion with education. It is not that those uneducated men in the traditional societies were really secret doubters who hid their doubts.

Men tend to be more independent, therefore they will make more decisions that conflict with the group. To be a religious person means to submit to God. Women are more submissive, therefore are more willing to submit to God. Traditional society forces men to submit anyway, so what’s one more thing?

But then again, men in less traditional societies tend to be more submissive in general. Machismo is a traditionalist trait. Maybe if you submit to God, you’re not going to submit to anyone else.

Where does the U.S. figure in the model? Is it an outlier once again?

Evolution has created in men a fundamental (even existential) interest in power. In traditional cultures, sectarian and secular power centers are strongly entwined, if not one and the same. As the two unravel in modern societies, men pursuing the latter will necessarily lose interest in the former, as rendering unto Caesar and mammon takes up more and more time and effort (though with bigger and bigger payoffs).

The “gender gap” remains much narrower in places like Utah, where religious devotion still counts strongly towards economic power and political influence. Nor do I think pretense has much to do with it (though appearances do count). Most men just aren’t that subtle. It’s an “in for a penny, in for a pound” type of thing, also the reason for the First Amendment.

And as stated above, more sectarian communities also give greater social cover to those men who, of their own volition, sincerely wish to spend more time rendering unto God, just as secular pressures give cover to those men who were never interested in religion in the first place. This leaves the happy middle to those of us not particularly captivated by either.

– Having children (what Tom Wolfe calls “serial immortality”) seems to decrease male interest in “personal immortality.”

– I’ve noticed that men tend to find it unlikely that God would be interested in their personal lives, whereas women feel the opposite.

Which sex is more likely to say which?

A. “If I were God, of course I’d pay attention to every individual’s personal hopes, fears, and dreams. Who wouldn’t?”

B. “If I were God, I’d spend my time in staff meetings with my archangels deciding whether or not to override my presumption against interfering with nature to avert the collision of two galaxies in a billion years that would cause the death of a quadrillion sentient life forms.”

Offended? This is why being a Calvinist makes life so much easier- you don’t have to be offended by the possibility genetic determinism (it’s easy not to be offended by science when all it does is prove you right).

“As traditional mores break down, however, men feel freer to be themselves…”

There’s your answer right there- civilization works precisely because it inhibits men from “being themselves”, at least in certain ways. Religious injunction is a primary way in which this is achieved. That women feel a greater stake in the system that prevents men from being themselves should not be too suprising.

Let’s keep in mind that most religions were founded by men and are run by men. Religions (even the wackiest of cults) are organizations, and have thus to be run by someone, and men (in general) love running things. The primary reason for religious patriarchy is that the promise of being in charge (someday) gives men a much greater incentive to become and stay involved.

I would like to see what happens if one looks at religions separately. What happens in religions such as Judaism (where a minyan of ten men is the minimum number of men necessary for prayers) or Islam, which is more demanding of men in terms of ritual prayer than,say, Episcopalianism or the Society of Friends. Is the effect still there, but the fall-off less steep?

Blink,

Could you please explain what you mean by nonsensical beliefs?

Also related:
Every womans magazine on the planet contains horoscopes. Virtually no mens magazine contains horoscopes.

My dad (an atheist) used to say that the reason that Mormons originally practiced polygamy is because Joseph Smith had so many more female followers than male he instituted polygamy to a) take advantage of the ratios, and b) attract more men to the group.

True or not, it would certainly fit in with the generalization that women are more prone to buying into faith-based belief systems.

Contrary to Dan Klein’s foundationless assertion, I did not pursue an academic career because I did not want to specialize in a discipine, not because my fragile female psyche couldn’t hack conflict. Politics had nothing to do with it, one way or the other. A “social scientist” who makes broad claims about specific individuals with not so much as a single anecdote to back him up would never cut it in journalism. But perhaps Dan is more interested in propaganda than empirical reality.

Women go in for religion, ‘horoscopes’ (professional astrologers say their clients are overwhelmingly female), & for ‘sentiment’: birthdays, aniiversaries, family get-togethers, family photos, & the like. Common element: ‘feeling’ rather than ‘analysis’. Didn’t a recent study of the brain show something similar? {I’m female, by the way.)