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

[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.)