Women-Led Secularization? Cross-National Cohort Evidence on the Changing Gender Gap in Religiosity

• In Event: New Approaches to Measuring Religion and Its Effects

Abstract

The gender gap in religiosity—women’s consistently higher levels of religious belief and practice—is one of the most enduring findings in the sociology of religion. Yet as secularization increasingly unfolds through cohort replacement, a critical question remains unresolved: is the gender gap stable across generations, or is it being transformed by generational change itself?
This paper examines whether contemporary secularization is becoming gendered in its generational mechanisms. Drawing on the harmonized Dataset of Integrated Measures of Religiosity PLUS [DIM-R+] (N = 1,393,338), which integrates European Social Survey [ESS] (waves 1–11), International Social Survey Programme [ISSP] Religion modules, and European Values Study/World Values Survey [EVS/WVS] waves, we analyze cohort trajectories in three dimensions of religiosity: self-declared religiosity (IMP_SDRn), attendance (IMP_ATT), and prayer (IMP_WPR), spanning birth cohorts from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first.
We test the hypothesis of female-led secularisation: although women have historically been more religious than men, their religiosity is declining faster across generations, leading to generational convergence. Descriptive cohort profiles and multilevel interaction models reveal that while religiosity declines for both genders, cohort-based decline is consistently steeper among women. As a result, the gender gap narrows not through male religious resurgence, but through accelerated women’s disengagement—most strongly in institutional participation, more moderately in subjective religiosity, and more gradually in private devotional practice.
Illustrative cross-national analyses across five diverse Christian contexts (United States, Poland, Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom) indicate that this pattern is not country-specific, although its magnitude varies. The findings refine cohort-replacement theory by demonstrating that secularization is not only generational but structurally gendered in its trajectory. More broadly, the results suggest that transformations in women’s social position may be reshaping the religious landscape in ways not fully captured by gender-neutral accounts of religious decline.

Authors

• Piotr Pawel Laskowski, University of Bialystok

• Lukasz Kiszkiel, University of Bialystok

• Konrad Talmont-Kaminski, University of Bialystok

• Wesley Wildman, Boston University

• Rachel J. Bacon, Center for Mind and Culture