Article: 5 Reasons There Aren't More Women in Atheism

[Creed of Heresy]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15...64354.html

Now, more than a month after "Elevatorgate" erupted, freethinkers are assessing its meaning. Many acknowledge they have a "woman problem" -- men outnumber women at atheist gatherings, both at the podium and in the audiences.

Yet many, including Watson, say Elevatorgate is less a calamity and more an opportunity to welcome women and other minorities into a community that's long been dominated by white men.

"The majority of emails I have gotten have been from men who said, 'I had no idea what women in this community went through, and thank you for opening my eyes,'" Watson said. "There has actually been a net benefit coming out of this that I think has made everything worthwhile."

[Michael Schubert]

Rebecca Watson made a great speech at Skepchick.

Really? You should have linked it. What you actually linked was 4 panelists talking about atheism, with 1 of them talking about feminism, instead.

Uh...this thread is about the Atheist community's women problem.

[Red Celt]

Really? You should have linked it. What you actually linked was 4 panelists talking about atheism, with 1 of them talking about feminism, instead.

Uh...this thread is about the Atheist community's women problem.

OK. Cool. Explain to me what the problem is.

[Angrboda]

In the 1770s, the French philosopher Baron d’Holbach observed a dearth of “incredulous women or female atheists,” reasoning that women were biologically more “disposed to credulity.”

I'm going to jump in without doing the necessary research, but I think many of you are missing the forest for the trees. From what I understand, and what the author of the Salon article contends, women are under-represented in atheism "with all other things being equal." It isn't about blame or feminism, it's looking at a curious anomaly in the data, the under-representation of women, and trying to find an explanation for it. The fact that atheism is "male-heavy" is so obvious that it even becomes the theme of tasteless humor in Conservapedia. I don't know whether the breakdown is similar for other secular movements, but it appears to be true of atheism. You have a gender gap, without a good explanation for it.

(Aside from other things, one fact about the demographics of atheism is that, collectively, atheists are younger than the general population. I've wondered if that isn't reflected in differences about the use of language and attitudes toward authority. I don't have the statistics at hand, but I know that women tend to become more conservative, politically, as they get older. If this is true of the general population, there may be simple population effects explaining the political composition of contemporary atheism. But back to the original question, the profile of the average atheist is different from the population average. And that raises a lot of questions, as well as suggesting some answers, and those questions are obscured if you focus on minimizing or explaining away the reality with a philosophical or political argument.)

[Red Celt]

The difference that you've highlighted is the gender gap within online atheism and/or atheists passionate/interested enough about the subject to attend conferences.

Do you have any figures relating to the gender differences between... y'know... actual atheists, out in the real world?

I would suggest that this is more of a difference about joining clubs.

[Slave]

I would wager that the gender gap arises due to a number of complex issues and would be hard to pinpoint. Statistically speaking there are more atheist males than females, with varying gaps between countries. Debatable to what extend biological differences between the sexes would account for the variation. There will be gender differences that influence our psychology to such an extent that place more women than men in certain career fields, and some biological differences that are mostly irrelevant due to cultural and societal factors.

You might as well make a point that there are fewer black atheists in the public eye and why that is.

[ITChick]

I would wager that the gender gap arises due to a number of complex issues and would be hard to pinpoint. Statistically speaking there are more atheist males than females, with varying gaps between countries. Debatable to what extend biological differences between the sexes would account for the variation. There will be gender differences that influence our psychology to such an extent that place more women than men in certain career fields, and some biological differences that are mostly irrelevant due to cultural and societal factors.

You might as well make a point that there are fewer black atheists in the public eye and why that is.

Are there really fewer women who are atheists? I don't tend to mix with a lot of them (I work in IT), but every single one I know well is an atheist.

Sources please

[rexbeccarox]

Purely anecdotal, but of the women I'm close with, only my roommate and I are atheists. The rest have varying degrees of spirituality, whatever that is, but no one is devout. As far as the men? None of them holds a religion, and I'd guess only two consider themselves atheists, and that the others just don't think about religion at all.

The Internet is where I talk/listen/read about religion. I would guess that's true with the majority of atheists. Weren't most of us raised to think it was rude to talk about religion or politics at the dinner table? Lucky for us, Al Gore invented the Internet.

Huh... I just had a thought: maybe it's a politeness factor. Are women, in general, more polite than men, therefore less likely to talk about religion, therefore less visible in the movement on the whole?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Purely anecdotal, but of the women I'm close with, only my roommate and I are atheists. The rest have varying degrees of spirituality, whatever that is, but no one is devout. As far as the men? None of them holds a religion, and I'd guess only two consider themselves atheists, and that the others just don't think about religion at all.

The Internet is where I talk/listen/read about religion. I would guess that's true with the majority of atheists. Weren't most of us raised to think it was rude to talk about religion or politics at the dinner table? Lucky for us, Al Gore invented the Internet.

Huh... I just had a thought: maybe it's a politeness factor. Are women, in general, more polite than men, therefore less likely to talk about religion, therefore less visible in the movement on the whole?

I would say, Rebecca, that this isn't true of most Northern and Western European states, but I guess that you're referring to the US.

Pretty much every woman I know here (UK) is an atheist, but that's down to demographics. Beyond that I couldn't say.

[Angrboda]

Are there really fewer women who are atheists? I don't tend to mix with a lot of them (I work in IT), but every single one I know well is an atheist.

Sources please

This only scratches the surface, so don't read too much into these aggregate statistics. There's more to understanding a statistic than just the number.

Men make up 58 percent of Americans who claim ‘‘no religion,’’ 70 percent of Americans who self-identify as ‘‘atheist,’’ and 75 percent of those who self-identify as ‘‘agnostic’’ (Keysar 2007). Men are also much more likely to become apostates – people who were once religious but are no longer, having rejected their religion at some point (Hadaway and Roof 1988; Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1997). Indeed, a substantial and international body of research makes it clear that on all measures of religiosity, men rate lower than women (Francis 1997; Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle 1997; Miller and Stark 2002; Furseth 2009; Walter and Davie 1998; Hayes 2000; Miller and Hoffman 1995; Batson et al. 1993).

— Phil Zuckerman, "Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being: How the Findings of Social Science Counter Negative Stereotypes and Assumptions"

You can retrieve a copy of the paper , or find it on the web. There's another paper by Zuckerman on methodological issues related to surveying and describing atheists, but I don't have that to hand at the moment.