Help or Hindrance? Religion’s Impact on Gender Inequality in Attitudes and Outcomes

Seguino, Stéphanie

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2010.12.004

Cited by 193 publications

(212 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…One study connected individual religiosity and country-level gender outcomes, showing that religiosity affects gender attitudes, and that gender attitudes then affect macro-level gender inequality (Seguino 2011). That study, however, did not examine the direct relationship between macro-level religion within a country and that country's macro-level gender outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion and Gender Equality Worldwide: A Country-Level Analysis

Schnabel

2015

Soc Indic Res

121

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Does religion help or hinder gender equality worldwide? Are some major world religions more conducive to equality than others? This study answers these questions using country-level data assembled from multiple sources. Much of the research on religion and gender has focused on the relationship between individual religious belief and practice and gender attitudes. This study, alternatively, compares the macro effects of the proportion of religious adherents in a country on two indicators of material gender equality: the United Nations Gender Inequality Index and the Social Watch Gender Equity Index. Comparing the world's four largest religious groups reveals that the largest distinction is not between any of the three largest faiths-Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism-but between the religious and the non-religious. The more non-religious people in a country, the more gender equal that country tends to be. This finding holds when accounting for human development and other country-level factors, as well as in instrumental variable analysis.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion and Gender Equality Worldwide: A Country-Level Analysis

Schnabel

2015

Soc Indic Res

121

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“…access to these family-planning methods, individual religious people use them when two conditions are met: the methods are 1) available and 2) seen as a culturally-acceptable option. In other words, basic access is a prerequisite, but norms and values matter as well, shaping fertility preferences and how people manage them, including reluctance or readiness to use effective methods for limiting fertility (Adamczyk 2008;McQuillan 2004;Ogland and Verona 2011;Schnabel 2016aSchnabel , 2016bSeguino 2011;Wilde and Danielsen 2015). 23 More secular cultures tend to have a general set of progressive societal norms about gender, family, and reproductionincluding gender egalitarianism, sex for pleasure rather than reproduction, and selfactualization-that lead to lower fertility preferences and greater readiness to use effective family planning methods (Adsera 2006;Buber-Ennser and Skirbekk 2016;Hayford and Morgan 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gender, sexuality, and familism are key sites for the expression of religious beliefs and values (Edgell and Docka 2007), and secularism contributes to several factors negatively associated with fertility: material gender equity (Schnabel 2016b), egalitarian gender attitudes (Schnabel 2016a;Seguino 2011), sexuality and abortion attitudes and practices (Adamczyk 2008;Adamczyk and Hayes 2012), and secular values more generally (Norris and Inglehart 2011). Although gender equity theory suggests material gender equity may be the most important intermediary factor (McDonald 2013), McQuillan (2004 argued that values related to gender and sexuality are key reasons why religion influences fertility (also see Hayford and Morgan 2008).…”

Section: Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Secularism and Fertility Worldwide

Schnabel¹

2016

Preprint

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This study hypothesizes a link between societal secularism and fertility. Using country-level data from multiple sources (N=181) and multilevel data from 55 countries in the World Values Survey (N=78,639), I document a strong negative relationship between societal secularism and both country-level fertility rates and individual-level fertility behavior. Secularism, even in small amounts, is associated with population stagnation or even decline, whereas highly religious countries have higher fertility rates that promote population growth. This country-level pattern is driven by more than aggregate lower fertility of individual nonreligious people. In fact, secularism is more closely linked to religious than nonreligious people's fertility behavior and appears to be a function of different cultural values related to gender and reproduction in more secular societies. Beyond its importance for the religious composition of the world population, the societal-level association between secularism and fertility is relevant to key fertility theories and may help account, in part, for below-replacement fertility. Rather than religious people becoming a smaller proportion of the world population, demographers have projected that because the nonreligious have fewer children they will make up a smaller proportion of the world population over time (Hackett et al. 2015;Kaufmann 2010;Skirbekk, Kaufmann, and Goujon 2010;Stonawski et al. 2015). This literature improves on secularization theory by highlighting how individual-level secularity limits fertility behavior and thus constrains secularization, but has thus far neglected potential impacts of societal-level secularity despite secularism being more than just an individual attribute. Culture is transmitted, and religious beliefs and preferences acquired, both vertically (i.e., within families) and 1 "Religious" and "nonreligious" can be defined in many ways. Past research has often conceptualized secularism as the inverse of absence of religion, and work on religion and fertility in particularly has frequently focused on binary measures that categorize people as religious or not. In order to consider varieties of secularism, I examine multiple religion/non-religion measures, some of which are binary and some gradational, and aggregations of these items.Secularism and Fertility Worldwide 2 horizontally (i.e., peer-to-peer within the wider culture) Verdier 2000, 2011).Research on religion and fertility has highlighted how the lower fertility of secular individuals limits vertical transmission of secularism, has thus far largely neglected potential demographic limits to horizontal transmission of secularism. The key unanswered question is whether a country-level relationship exists between secularism and fertility net of individual-level religion, which would further constrain secularization-due to fewer children being socialized in more secular contexts-and could contribute to below-replacement fertility.To examine the country-level relationship between secularism and f...

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“…In particular, strong religious beliefs have commonly been associated with conservative attitudes (Cukur, de Guzman, & Carlo, 2014) and the pursuit of "absolute moral standards" (Yeganeh, 2015: 587), which tend towards strict definitions of acceptable behavior. These beliefs have commonly been associated with various forms of tolerance such as attitudes restricting the role of women in society (Seguino, 2011) and the acceptance and rights of homosexuals (Jäckle & Wenzelburger, 2015). Religion has also been linked to attitudes towards immigrants (e.g., Foner & Alba, 2008), and religious particularism has been linked to racial prejudice in Europe (Ekici & Yucel, 2015).…”

Section: Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%