Where Can Women Do What? A Quantitative Analysis of the Gender Gap in World Christianity

This paper presents preliminary findings from a new project, “Women in World Christianity: Global Perspectives on Christian Participation,” which measures the gendered gap between membership and participation in churches worldwide. The project’s Christian Participation Index allows for comparison at the country level of differences between men and women in church attendance, prayer, importance of religion, supernatural beliefs, pastoral leadership, and other forms of church leadership. Such information can be applied contextually to address the gendered dynamics of church life and interrogate unequal social norms that perpetuate women’s overlooked status in churches worldwide. This paper will present the assumptions and theories undergirding this project, methods and sources used to create this dataset, preliminary findings, and areas for future potential sociological and quantitative research on women in World Christianity.