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Soc Indic Res (2016) 129:893907
DOI 10.1007/s11205-015-1147-7
Landon Schnabel1
Accepted: 12 October 2015 / Published online: 16 October 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Does religion help or hinder gender equality worldwide? Are some major world religions more conducive to equality than others? This study answers these questions using country-level data assembled from multiple sources. Much of the research on religion and gender has focused on the relationship between individual religious belief and practice and gender attitudes. This study, alternatively, compares the macro effects of the proportion of religious adherents in a country on two indicators of material gender equality: the United Nations Gender Inequality Index and the Social Watch Gender Equity Index. Comparing the worlds four largest religious groups reveals that the largest distinction is not between any of the three largest faithsChristianity, Islam, and Hinduismbut between the religious and the non-religious. The more non-religious people in a country, the more gender equal that country tends to be. This nding holds when accounting for human development and other country-level factors, as well as in instrumental variable analysis.
Keywords Gender equality Religion Non-religion Atheism Agnosticism
Christianity Islam Hinduism
Does religion help or hinder gender equality worldwide? Are some major world religions more conducive to equality than others? This study answers these questions using country-level data assembled from multiple sources. Much of the research on gender and religion has focused on gender attitudes and individual-level inequalities within one or a few countries (but see Inglehart and Norris 2003a; Norris and Inglehart 2011; Seguino 2011). This study, alternatively, compares the macro effects of the proportion of religious adherents in a country on two country-level indicators of material gender outcomes: the United Nations Gender Inequality Index and the Social Watch Gender Equity Index.
& Landon Schnabel [email protected]
1 Department of Sociology, Indiana University, 744 Ballantine Hall, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.,
Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11205-015-1147-7&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11205-015-1147-7&domain=pdf
Web End = Religion and Gender Equality Worldwide: A Country-Level Analysis
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1 Background
Religious leaders sometimes argue that religion has a liberating effect, but most of the research literature shows that the non-religious tend to be more egalitarian (Schnabel Forthcoming; Petersen and Donnenwerth 1998; Zuckerman 2008, 2009). Some recent research has been conducted on...