Globally, women remain more religious than men across nearly every measure — prayer, attendance, and affiliation — with 83.4% of women claiming religious ties compared to 79.9% of men, according to Pew Research. Yet the gap is narrowing in the U.S., not because young men are returning to faith, but because young women are leaving it. PRRI data shows 40% of women aged 18–29 identified as unaffiliated in 2024, up 11 points since 2013. The full picture reveals even more.
Women Are Still More Religious: What the Data Shows
Across most standard measures of religious life, women remain more religious than men worldwide. Pew Research found that in 61 of 192 countries, women were at least two percentage points more likely than men to claim a religious affiliation.
Globally, 83.4% of women identified with a faith group, compared with 79.9% of men. Women also reported higher rates of daily prayer, weekly attendance, and saying religion is very important.
Significantly, even religiously unaffiliated women outpaced unaffiliated men on engagement measures. The pattern is broad, though not universal, with Christian populations showing the most consistent differences between women and men.
In the United States, data from the General Social Survey shows that about 61% of women engage in Bible reading, private prayer, or meditation daily, compared with roughly 43% of men — a gap that persists even after researchers control for factors like income, education, and social context.
The 2025 Pew Religious Landscape Study confirmed that while the gender gap is narrowing among younger Americans, no birth cohort shows men significantly more religious than women. This aligns with the biblical understanding of faith as trust in God expressed through belief, obedience, and perseverance.
Why Muslim and Christian Women Show Opposite Patterns
While women tend to be more religious than men in most parts of the world, the size of that gap depends heavily on which religious tradition is being examined.
Pew Research found that Christian women outpaced Christian men in daily prayer by an average of 10 percentage points across 54 countries.
Among Muslims, that same gap nearly disappeared, averaging just 2 points across 40 countries.
Muslim women and men showed virtually no difference in viewing religion as very important.
Pew concluded that religious tradition and regional context, not gender alone, shape how these differences develop. The religiously unaffiliated population skews notably male, with men making up 55% compared to women at 45%. Churches’ differing stances on women pastors and leadership roles can influence participation and patterns of religious commitment.
Why Are Women More Religious? The Leading Explanations
The pattern of Christian women praying more than Christian men, and Muslim women showing almost no such gap, points to something larger: the religious behavior of women cannot be explained by gender alone. Researchers have identified several overlapping explanations:
- Social roles: caregiving and domestic duties keep women closer to religious life
- Existential insecurity: poverty, poor health, and vulnerability make religion more appealing
- Risk aversion: women’s caution may encourage religious “insurance,” though evidence is mixed
- Social control: male pressure and community expectations can shape female religious practice
Sociologists Trzebiatowska and Bruce call it an “amalgam of different social facts.” Across the United States, women pray daily at a rate of 66% compared to just 49% of men, reflecting how deeply these overlapping factors embed religious practice into female life. A study published in the *Journal of Demographic Economics* found that women across almost all faiths and nations are more religious than men, confirming the gender religiosity gap as a near-universal phenomenon. Prayer functions in several ways within religious life, serving as communication with God that includes worship, confession, thanksgiving, and intercession.
The U.S. Gender Gap Is Closing : But Not How You’d Expect
For decades, women in the United States were reliably more religious than men — more likely to attend services, pray regularly, and call faith central to their lives. That gap is now closing, but the driver is not men becoming more devout.
It is young women pulling away from religion. PRRI found that 40% of women ages 18–29 identified as religiously unaffiliated in 2024, up 11 points from 2013.
Their weekly attendance dropped from 29% to 19% over the same period. Young men, by contrast, changed very little, making convergence less a male revival than a female departure. This pattern appears consistently across the General Social Survey, the Survey Center on American Life, and the Cooperative Election Study, with young women outpacing young men in religious unaffiliation by 2020.
Yet Barna’s mid-2025 tracking tells a different story at the broader adult level, where men now outpace women in weekly church attendance, with 45% of U.S. adult men reporting weekly attendance compared to 36% of women — the largest gender gap Barna has observed in its research. Pastoral ministry and mental-health awareness efforts are among the practical responses communities are using to address religious decline and provide compassionate support.
Women Leaving Religion Faster, Not Men Joining It
What is shifting the religion gender gap is not a surge of male devotion but a faster rate of female departure.
Women’s church attendance dropped roughly 20 percentage points over less than 30 years.
- 54% of Gen Z adults who left their childhood faith were women
- 39% of Gen Z women identified as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, versus 34% of men
- Women’s attendance fell five points between 2012 and 2020, then held steady at 27%
- The trend reverses older patterns, where men more commonly made up the majority leaving religion
Among young adults, men aged 18–35 retained their religious affiliation at a rate of 80%, while women trailed at 76%, offering panel-level confirmation that early adulthood is a period of sharper religious reevaluation for women than for men.
A significant driver of this departure is perceived inequality within religious institutions, with 65% of Gen Z women believing the church treats men and women differently, compared to 53% of Baby Boomer women who hold the same view.
Many young women also cite concerns about biblical interpretations and how scripture is applied in communities as influencing their decisions to leave.
