Religious Commitment

While Christian women are on the whole more religious than Christian men, Muslim women and Muslim men have similar levels of religious commitment. And when it comes to attendance at worship services, Muslim men are more active than Muslim women.

A discussion with David Voas of the Department of Social Science at University College London on the gender gap in religion around the world.

Gender gap in weekly worship service attendance differs between Muslim-majority and Christian-majority countries.

Generally, women are more likely than men to be affiliated with a religious organization; women also pray more, and are more inclined to say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Standard lists of history’s most influential religious leaders – among them Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) – tend to be predominantly, if not exclusively, male. Many religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews, allow only men to be clergy, while others, including some denominations in the evangelical Protestant tradition, have lifted that restriction only in recent decades. Yet it often appears that the ranks of the faithful are dominated by women.

Southern states are among the most highly religious states in the U.S., while those in New England are among the least devout.

We sat down with Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at New York University, to examine possible reasons.

Americans place less importance on religion in their lives than do people in a number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia -- but more than residents of many other Western and European countries.