A Gender Lens on Religion

Abstract

This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, acknowledge developments in the global South, and develop more compelling theoretical frameworks that analyze religion from a gendered perspective. Our aim is to bring religion to the attention of gender and feminist scholars and to encourage religion scholars to consider gender not just as a variable but as a social structure. We hope that both groups of scholars will consider gender and religion as mutually constitutive social categories.

The Gender Pray Gap: Wage Labor and the Religiosity of High-Earning Women and Men

“…hastings and Lindsay (2013) proposed that women's higher levels of religiosity may disappear among women and men with elite careers, but their study could only speculate about larger societal patterns and called for nationally representative research. My study goes a step further than what they suggested, however, by exploring how religiosity varies both between and within genders, thus also answering recent calls to consider aspects of intersectionality (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015;Cornwall 2009). In addition to examining individual earnings, this study assesses family income as an alternative explanation that would lend greater support to Norris and Inglehart's (2011) existential security hypothesis than to hasting and Lindsay's (2013) status and prestige argument.…”

“…For example, women and men who have elite careers differ from those who do not, and an elite woman and elite man could be more similar than an elite woman and a nonearning woman. In this article, rather than limit exploration to between-gender differences alone, I follow Cornwall's (2009) and Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo's (2015) calls to consider gender processes and aspects of intersectionality as an important complement to previous explanations for gender differences. This study underscores the importance of exploring differences among women and among men to better understand the differences between them. I focus primarily on one aspect of intersectionality-the intersection of gender, earnings, and religion-to extend previous research indicating the importance of class-related processes for contextualizing gender differences in religiosity (Collett and Lizardo 2009;hastings and Lindsay 2013).…”

“…however, it does not differentiate between how women and men may experience the same level of financial security differently, as intersectionality theory would suggest. Furthermore, the existential security hypothesis does not take into account cultural assumptions about gender norms, religion as a gendered institution, and the gendered nature of rewards and validation people receive in religious communities (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015;hoffmann and Bartkowski 2008;Irby 2014;Prickett 2015;Zion-Waldoks 2015). Finally, instead of religion providing a coping mechanism for existential insecurity, religiosity may, as hoffmann and Bartkowski argued (2008), provide women a compensatory mechanism for lack of status and authority.…”

Where Men Appear More Religious Than Women: Turning a Gender Lens on Religion in Israel

“…Based on the results presented in this study, we suggest that gender gaps arise, at least in part, simply because religions are gendered institutions with gendered norms, experiences, and social and psychological incentives (Avishai 2016;Avishai et al 2015;Edgell, Frost, and incentives vary from one religious context to another. To put these gendered norms and expectations in more concrete terms, only men count toward a minyan, synagogues are often gender-segregated, and women are not permitted to participate in some Jewish practices.…”

“…we argue that religion is a key aspect of our intersectional selves as gendered people (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015;Edgell 2017;Schnabel 2016), that different religions are gendered in different ways (Hackett et al 2016;Schnabel 2015a), and, subsequently, that people in different religions with varying gendered expectations should exhibit divergent gender gaps.…”