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New to this forum and expecting to learn a lot from all of these powerful minds merged together in the same pool. I have had a question for a few years and have not been able to find the answer, so hopefully you can stir me in the right direction.
When I talk to my friends and colleagues, I find a larger amount of male atheists with a unfortunate minority on the opposing sex. This is not because I have less female friends than males, although that is probably accurate. It is also not true that every single female I know is a believer. I have found that there are female atheists, although I really do not know too many of them personally. As a result, I can not help but to notice the ratio at hand.
Maybe I am wrong and it is just a coincidence, but maybe there is a pattern here. Are there some demographics that study the gender based relationship when it comes to atheism?
Statistically, males are more likely to be non-believers than females in the USA; I’m not sure about the rest of the world. I’m looking for a citation now.
There was a paper written several years ago now by a professor at the University of Washington that attempted to explain it as a male inclination towards “risk-taking” behavior, which received quite a bit of popular press. I was skeptical, but don’t think that I have a satisfying explanation either.
To examine rates of religiosity, Stark used the World Values Surveys, which collected data in 57 nations. The world’s major faiths were included and the data came from such countries as the United States, most European states, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, China, India, South Africa and Turkey. In all 57 countries, a higher percentage of women than men said they were religious.
Looking at it again, I find it even more ridiculous as an explanation. Perhaps its a component, though.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen numbers from Statistics Canada (a govt agency) that show the same thing. . . more women still attend church regularly than men.
What that means, or why, I’ve no idea either! It may have something to do with the social aspect of congregational life. I know at least one woman now well into retirement who is atheist and has been for a few decades at least, but still attends church fairly regularly. It’s a chance to meet and chat with all her friends, most of whom still believe! That’s anecdotal and true in one instance. I wonder if the apparent difference in belief levels is false and the gap explained by something like that at work?
There might be a significantly skew ratio, but it would probably have to do with social conditioning more than anything genetic. Just like when people say that women are better multitaskers, it’s only because in their social positions they are trained, nonintentionally, to be better multitaskers. It has nothing to do with genetics.
I’ve heard the explanation that women generally or traditionally are the ones who maintain social relationships in the family, and the church is a easy place to maintain those relationships.
Like most things I don’t think there is one neat little, wrapped in a box, answer to this observation but rather a lot of factors.
I think people are on the right track when they look at the social aspect of organised religion being attractive to women, on many levels. You basically have a social group that meet every sunday that bond over tea and biscuits . In my experience (going for some time to a Church of England church) the women didn’t really spend that much time talking about Jesus/the Bible/etc in any depth, it was more about their personal problems and what they were doing the rest of the week.
Another part of the reason for more women being religious, I think is the psychological aspect of it in relation to death of your children/loved ones, etc. It is very comforting to a lot of women to think that they will some one day be reunited with them. It must be especially hard for mothers knowing that you had another human being grow inside you only for you to part from them at some point in the future. I remember one women in church being absolutely frantic that her children were non-believers, it’s a hard thing to consider what would happen to them if there really is a hell. Any religion that taps into this anxiety and says you will live after death is bound to have a significant psychological effect on some. Also, in terms of bringing up children, you have these ready built institutions more than willing to get more people handling the collection plate, plus they provide a (supposed) instruction book for life. How can you resist…
Church attendance is higher among more elderly people than young people. Women live longer than men. Correlation there? From my own experience women and men are equally sceptical but maybe that’s just my friends.
Hmm… These are all great responses and I guess I knew it was going to be impossible to find an easy answer to the question. I was just trying to determine whether my observation was accurate or not, and all of your input has indeed opened my mind to different points of view. Like the lady that is an atheist but still goes to church for fraternizing purposes.
Still, the behavior I see is this: I can have a discussion on why I believe there is no God with males, but as soon as I bring it up to most females I know, I better call a surgeon to reattach my head! These ladies can not even consider the possibility there is no God. BTW, the only female I can have this discussion without fearing my head being torn off like banana peelings, is my wife. There is no way I could have married a believer! Although she is not an atheist… Not yet…
On the other hand, I can have this discussion with males even if they are partial believers! Actually, the great majority of my male friends are not atheists. I am practically alone on this field, which is why this forum is going to be so much fun for me.
So bottom line, my female friends will not even dare to go into a sand pebble of Atheist Beach, while my male friends may not bathe on the warm waters, but will play with the sand.
BTW, it can also be cultural as 80% of my friends are from Puerto Rico, so I have to put that into the equation here…
social and psychological “conditioning” notwithstanding, logic would suggest neurological differences in the genders which could account for greater susceptibility in females to religious ideas.
perhaps women have evolved a more developed “theory of mind” (the ability to reason about others’ beliefs)? why would this be?
“Because the individual person is the vehicle by which genes are transmitted, natural selection would have favored the evolution of a subjective self that was largely focused on others’ thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge about it. This is because these psychological states could be manipulated and cause others to act in ways that maximized reproductive success.” (Bering, 2008)
these psychological states (“explain(ing) and predict(ing) others’ behaviors by making causal inferences about their unobservable mental states”) could therefore also be manipulated to advance theological ideas and agendas.
The problem, of course, is that we can’t put socialization and cognitive development aside, which leaves us very much in the domain of speculation. Its relatively easy to come up with possible causes for this apparent disparity, but if we can’t test them, then we’re no better off than when started. Since development and socialization play such an important role in determining our range of behaviors, we simply can’t ignore them.
As I was doing thesis research about human’s linguistic abilities, I came across an account (by Ray Jackendof or perhaps Philip Lieberman) of a psychological study in which a newborn kitten was bound in such a way that it was never exposed to anything but vertical lines during its period of brain development. Having never been exposed to them during growth, the brain never developed the ability to detect horizontal lines, and the cat never gained the ability throughout the rest of its (obviously miserable) life. The experiential differences between cats (the experimantal and the control) caused permanent brain differences. I gave this example because it’s so bizarre and and involves kittens, but the same thing is seen in many areas of cognitive development, as is the case with developmental aphasia; when kids are not exposed to language during development of the linguistic centers of the brain, they will never become linguistic.
That is all just to say that even if we were able to detect physical, substantive differences between male and female brains, and determine that those differences have implications for religious belief, we still wouldn’t be able to trace it back to genetic differences. At least, not until someone raises some children in a completely controlled laboratory setting and they are the subjects of continual experimentation… and lets hope that that time does not come soon.
That said, if I were going to speculate on a cause, I would look for support for these propostions:
First, that social relationships are more important to females than males, genetically based or not. From what I’ve heard in sociology classes, this is statistically supported, even in the way that boys and girls play the same games differently (when a conflict comes up, girls are more likely to change the rules or quit the game in order to prevent someone’s feelings getting hurt, while boys are more likely to stick to the rules at the expense of emotions. This came from my Proff, I have no citation, so take it with a grain of salt).
Since many non-human primates live in single male/multiple female groups (and polygyny is relatively common in humans still) there may have been some evolutionary force in developing cognitive differences related to social relationships in women… although I don’t know exactly how that argument would work. It is a fact, however, that women are better at recognizing emotions from subtle changes in human expressions, though.
Finally, that religious belief is caused by social instincts rather than rational reasoning, at least in enough cases to account for the statistical differences between male and female rates of belief. This should be pretty clear from reading Emile Durkheim and other sociologists of religion, and also from the work of people like Dan Dennet and Andy Thompson.
oh i absolutely don’t think we should dismiss socialization and cognitive development, but neither should we discount the possibility of neurologic difference and it could, in fact, be tested. development and socialization do play a role and a significant one, but the brain’s ability or inability to be influenced certainly still depends upon the physical mass processing said influences.
jmatthewgore - 14 May 2009 10:38 AM
That is all just to say that even if we were able to detect physical, substantive differences between male and female brains, and determine that those differences have implications for religious belief, we still wouldn’t be able to trace it back to genetic differences. At least, not until someone raises some children in a completely controlled laboratory setting and they are the subjects of continual experimentation… and lets hope that that time does not come soon.
i bring this up because of an interesting video I just watched with dr thomson presenting some neuroimaging evidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMmvu9eMrg (see 27:22 )
there may have been some evolutionary force in developing cognitive differences related to social relationships in women… although I don’t know exactly how that argument would work. It is a fact, however, that women are better at recognizing emotions from subtle changes in human expressions, though.
this is what I was speculating on, especially after having listened to thomson’s talk above.
A couple of things, though. First, 5 years old would be far too old, since such a massive amount of brain development (and mental development generally) occur before age 5. But that’s really neither here nor there; the point is that socialization and environmental conditions MAKE PHYSICAL CHANGES in the brain, so if we were to find them, we still would not be able to determine whether they were caused by a genetic difference. A baby’s brain is born with a massive padding of neurons, a large percentage of which atrophy and disappear during the first few years of life. Brain areas that don’t receive stimulation (such as the ability to recognize horizontal lines) disappear.
Unfortunately, a map of a person’s genome is not sufficient to determine what characteristics are expressed in that individual, partially because of the other proteins that play important roles, but also because of our poor understanding of the biology involved, which will no doubt improve. But this depends on our being able to positively define what it means for women to be “more social” etc, correlate a particular brain/physiological structure with that difference, and then prove that that difference not only has a genetic basis, but that the genetic basis is more important than the socializing/environmental factors that follow it (that is, if a boy were socialized as a girl, would his brain and behavior still be more like a boy’s). And in that regard, cognitive science / philosophy of mind have a long way to go.
I think the explanation for this is that men are overwhelmingly better than women at thinking for themselves. It’s not trendy to say things like this, so many people won’t like it. But the brute fact is simply that this is what the data indicates. Men continue to overwhelmingly outperform women in occupations of creativity, despite that sexual discrimination is no longer sufficient to be the sole cause of this.
Simplistic answer that popped to the front of my mind at once: Women are wired to be more emotional than men, and of course emotion overrides reason. Shrug. Not a very astute assertion, I’m afraid.
. In my experience (going for some time to a Church of England church) the women didn’t really spend that much time talking about Jesus/the Bible/etc in any depth, it was more about their personal problems and what they were doing the rest of the week.
