It’s Official: Men Win!

That women think with their feelings more?

I’m just glad I’m one of the enlightened females outside of the 86% and outside of the US.

To add to what Zac said above, I believe that people also turn more to religion when they are economically underprivileged, as women commonly tend to find themselves in comparison to men.

Going off in a different direction, men are taught that their successes are the result of their hard work and ingenuity, whereas women are often conditioned to attribute their successes to good luck. Perhaps this could also translate to a higher likelihood to turn to something spiritual.

Finally, if we consider that in a society that is secular to the extent that the US’s is–that is, no state religion–religion is part of the “domestic sphere,” which is also traditionally the domain of women, so perhaps they find themselves turning to it more frequently because it was more part of their day-to-day lives in the domestic sphere than men experience as they move between the domestic and public spheres.

(I realize that with the rise of evangelicalism in the US since the Reagan era, religion is no longer confined to the domestic sphere. Prior to that, evangelicals and other conservative religious folk were not exactly encouraged by their churches to get involved politically/to use the church as an organizing point for political movements.)

I would guess it is more to do with the association with religion and solid family values. People tend to find religion again once they have children (citation needed) because it is seen as the nurturing, responsible thing to do and women probably have a greater tendency to want to do the nurturing, responsible thing. Men are more likely to want to buy the motorcycle and the golf clubs.

Just a guess. You can bet the answer is going to be fairly nuanced and multi-faceted.

Okay, if no one else is going to do it, I’ll just go ahead and say what everyone else is thinking – men are less religious because they’re more logical.

*gasp*

I went there.

What can we learn from this…?

That sexism is alive and well

Sabayon said:

In short skepticism is seen at inherently unwomanly.

i agree…..but why is this?

somehow ‘spirituality’ has come to equal ‘wisdom’ to some.

Have any of you seen the film ‘The Hospital’? in it, the main female character, when asked “what DO you believe in Miss Drummond?”, responds: “I believe in everything”

I can only think that this favour associated with ‘belief’ is somehow related to ‘being hopeful’ ~ or the power that is associated with ‘having faith’….

in any event, it’s highly annoying.

you know, Judd, my first instinct was the same, but thinking about it further, I am not so sure. As someone raised conservatively-later-turned-atheist, I would have to say that the hardest thing in admitting atheism was not the logic of it, but eschewing the cultural norm and more than 20 years in church. Women, I think, are often more in tune with what people think of them. It is hard for many woman to go against cultural norms, whether is in appearances or in behavior, including religion.

This would make a very interesting study–what kind of women become atheists? That could give us a clue on the answer. Hmm, maybe I found my next research project. . .

Unbrainwashed, high testosterone levels have been scientifically shown to decrease reasoning ability, estrogen never has. Psycological studies suggest that the “biological imperative” to nuture children is bullshit. By the way, IQ tests carry massive cultural biases (every American who took the first IQ test tested as mentally retarded because they were designed in France). IQ tests given in the US are desigened for upper class white men. Look over the evidence again, with the same critical eye you use about religion instead of assuming women are stupid and going from there.

Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective

Ugh, evopsych bunk is creeping into this discussion.

I’d definitely lean towards cultural conditioning in a deeply patriarchal and misogynistic society. Perhaps a better way to look at it is to ask ourselves why men score lower?

Doesn’t anyone remember “You Just Don’t Understand” and the later popular book “Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus“?

Women prize affiliation in the way that men prize independence. An instinct to morph oneself toward similarity to a group is a strong female trait. Religions reward this behavior.

Men prefer to be outliers; to influence via outstanding performance. Religions are fractured by this behavior. But they are also started by it.

I’d love to see numbers on the GLBT population and religion. I run into a number of non-GLBT people who assume my wife and I are atheists *because* we were run off by religion–and thus we get lots of “our church is very accepting.” But most of the other GLBT people I know are religious, some exceedingly so. They may not attend church regularly, depending on the congregations available to them, but they truly believe.

(I even just asked my wife if she can think of a *single* other gay person we know who’s also an atheist, and the consensus is no.)

I’m so not digging the women-are-less-logical-because-they’re-women train of thought some of y’all are heading down. Enculturation has far more to do with the mind than biology, and it is unfortunate that most people feel it necessary to conform to society’s tight standards (men have their own culturally-induced problems as well, of course, but different ones, for the most part). Personally I find that nothing impedes my logic, and I may be an exception but it is certainly not due to my levels of testosterone or anything like that.

hrmmm.. Interesting thought there Erp, do women just tend towards extremes?

What can we learn from this…?

That the results of a survey can say anything we want them to.

Was anyone else fooled by their social conditioning to associate blue with men and pink with women and therefore misread the chart?

For a minute or so I thought to myself, “These results contradict everything I have ever read about the relationship of belief between men and women and who is more likely to hold religious beliefs.” Then I looked at the chart a little closer and realized my mistake.

Given the discussion here and the insistence on an almost 100% nurture explanation, I think it’s pretty obvious many of the commenters aren’t actually “non-religious”. Of course, I’m exempting yl999, Judd, and myself.

I think many here subscribe to the religion of political correctness, deluded leftism, or the delusion of gross egalitarianism.

These are the individuals who repudiate evolutionary psychology offhand because it opposes their basic premise of social equity. These individuals who decry creationists for ignoring scientific facts and then hold the idea that evolutionary pressures would have no bearing on practical human qualities (i.e. such as gender disparities in math or leadership potential).

See not even atheists are free from “religious” doctrine? A quick gander at PC Meyer (yes I spelled it wrong on purpose) is quite enough evidence of that.

Whether “nature or nurture” have the upper hand, it’s still bloody sexist to say “Men Win”. Grimalkin’s points are valid, but even if there was conclusively a natural bias towards women being more religious, women are individuals. Many of them will not conform to the average. I’m a woman and an athiest, the Pope is a man, but shame on my sex eh? (For the example of a man, please note I could’ve used pretty much any other religious leader. But I’m not going to gloat over that because I’m not prepared to lump 50% of the population together.)

Just saying, it would’ve been much more helpful to try and get to the social roots of why women are more religious.

Not exactly. Intelligent design is still based on the idea that there is a higher power out there, which just can’t be proven empirically. Neither can evolutionary psychology. There is no fossil record we can assemble, no genetic similarities to examine. Evolutionary psychology is mostly trying to connect the dots. Let’s not place it on the same level as the theory of evolution.

Also, it’s a huge leap from saying that women have lower spacial-reasoning skills than men to saying that women are less logical than men. Logic is made up of so many different parts. I’d love to know what you have to say about women’s superiour conflict-resolving skills, for example. Doesn’t that take logic too? Recent studies have also reported that there actually isn’t that great a disparity between girls’ and boys’ performance in math after all.

Neither can evolutionary psychology. There is no fossil record we can assemble, no genetic similarities to examine

Is evopsych more conjecture than evolution sure? But you make it sound like it’s baseless hypothesizing from misogynistic and racist intellectuals. There are scientific underpinnings to evopsych, such as using natural selection, namely group selection, to explain the ubiquity of racism. Germane to gender disparities, there exist fundamental hormonal differences between men and women that have a quantifiable effect in society, such as men committing more crimes than women. In addition, brain scanning technology, as well as simply weighing brains relative to body mass, suggest men have slightly larger brains than women. I could keep going. But the point is that much data can be provided to justify societal differences as being caused by biological differences. As with evolution, you can counter with seemingly reasonable evidence (ID-iots use irreducible complexity and entropy while you can quote Stephen Jay Gould at length). But it doesn’t mean you’re right.

I’d love to know what you have to say about women’s superiour conflict-resolving skills

Interesting that you’re willing to accept woman’s superiority in one aspect (and by extension, accepting a premise of evopsych), but refuse to do so in another context where women just happen to be inferior. Women have better conflict reasoning skills because they are more equipped for emotionally charged situations. This is an imperative from being the child bearers and having to develop higher skills of language, communication, and social cooperation. The main difference results from reading emotions and people, not logic.

Recent studies have also reported that there actually isn’t that great a disparity between girls’ and boys’ performance in math after all.

That study, which I’ve seen plenty of times before, is quite dubious. Not surprising a WOMEN’S STUDIES prof did it. State tests are largely the domain of social engineers attempting to moderate all gender and racial gaps. Cheating, as detailed in Freaknomics, is rampant. Further, as the article states, many tests aren’t a good measure of higher reasoning skills.

I prefer to look at the SAT, Math League competitions, etc. which clearly provide a much better gauge of aptitude than achievement tests like those cited.

I notice others are very willing to jump to some extreme conclusions. Skeptics, are we?

As Richard Dawkins said (paraphrasing): “We should be open minded, but so much that our brains fall out.” If the evidence suggests a truth, no matter how socially unappealing, one should accept it. Apparently, PC atheists like to tell this to hardcore religious freaks, but can’t follow their own advice.

Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennet also gave glowing reviews of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which deals with gender dispairites.

“how courageous to buck the liberal trend in science, while remaining in person the best sort of liberal”, perhaps recalling his own struggle with creationism. “We academics are too sophisticated to fall for taboos,” Dan Dennett adds, with approval.”

If the evidence suggests a truth, no matter how socially unappealing, one should accept it. Apparently, PC atheists like to tell this to hardcore religious freaks, but can’t follow their own advice.

I see you’re attempting to make a broader point about reasoning skills and somehow claim that this survey is support for that. I don’t think that this survey lends support to your argument until you at least account for education level, which would seem quite prudent.

I’m talking about being unwilling to extrapolate anything other than what the data shows from the Pew survey.

Is that PC? Hmm… how strange. I just don’t understand the culture wars sometimes.

The Unbrainwashed:

The main reason why most of us don’t give much credence to evopsych is that it can be used to prove anything. If men are shown to be aggressive rapists, evo-psychologists argue that it’s because men don’t have as much biological imperative as women to commit to their children. On the other hand, if men are shown to be kind, nurturing parents, it’s explained away as a result of the higher survivability of that man’s children. And so on. You can figure out some explanation for really any kind of behavior that will make some sense. The problem is that we have zero hard evidence that this was actually the case. The things that make a species successful are so complicated and so circumstantial that to argue that a specific behavior we see today must have made ancient humans adaptive is hogwash. We just don’t have the evidence. I’m not saying that therefore it must all be social, it’s just it’s almost impossible to get evidence that something is definitely biologically determined while it’s easy to see that the genders are treated in very different ways. Maybe the gender differences we see are biological, maybe they aren’t, but we’ll never really know until we see a society that treats both genders fairly and equally, which will probably never happen in our lifetimes. The whole discussion is as much opinion as fact as it stands now.

In any case, it’s just as good a question to ask why men are less religious as it is to ask why women are more so. We know that men are shown less emotion from birth onwards, are given less emotional support, and allowed to display emotion far less than women. Maybe men just have less to lose than women?

On a more humorous note, I still think that the half-naked Jesuses might make a small difference. If they strung the walls with nearly nude women I betcha a few more men would show up on Sunday mornings.

If the evidence suggests a truth, no matter how socially unappealing, one should accept it.

No, actually, one should not accept a claim on evidence that is merely suggestive, and certainly should not elevate it to “a truth” — to do so is the behavior of an ideologue.

Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennet also gave glowing reviews of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which deals with gender dispairites.

“how courageous to buck the liberal trend in science, while remaining in person the best sort of liberal”, perhaps recalling his own struggle with creationism. “We academics are too sophisticated to fall for taboos,” Dan Dennett adds, with approval.”

Did your mother teach you to prevaricate like that? Dawkins and Dennett were referring to the general nature/nurture debate, not to the specific claims of gender disparity that you’re hawking.

Not surprising a WOMEN’S STUDIES prof did it

ad hominem much? And Elizabeth Spelke is not “a women’s studies prof”.

But I think the disparity results in a basic propensity to distinguish reason from emotion. Women, with higher levels of estrogen and a biological imperative to be the child bearers and subsequently their nurturers, will tend to make decisions more so on feeling than objective analysis. When you kill a boar, as men did in early humanity, it only matters that the arrow has the right trajectory, not the tone in which you speak to the arrow.

Good grief that is ignorant. You might want to read Marvin Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine” — human intelligence is impossible without emotion. Your last sentence suggests, very wrongly, that autism is a survival trait.