A comment below asks:
Well, good for you for getting me to click through by using an interesting post title. But how do you know women who “know god exists” aren’t assuming a female god?
In a vacuum of all knowledge about this sort of topic this is a reasonable question. But there’s plenty of social science data showing that American women tend to be more religiously conservative & “orthodox” as a whole than men (in contrast to female ministers or rabbis, who are more likely to be progressive than their male counterparts from what I gather). But I decided to see how textually “conservative” men and women were who “know God exists” (a subset of the population) were in relation to each other. Data below….
| Bible Word of God + "Knows God Exists" | ||||||
| Male | Female | Diff. | % Diff. | 95-interval male | 95-interval female | |
| All | 45.1 | 48 | 2.9 | 6% | 42.7-47.5 | 46.1-49.9 |
| White | 43.5 | 44.6 | 1.1 | 3% | 40.8-46.3 | 42.5-46.6 |
| Black | 53.1 | 62.2 | 9.1 | 17% | 47.7-58.6 | 58.4-66.1 |
| College+ | 21 | 29.5 | 8.5 | 40% | 17.4-24.6 | 25.9-33.1 |
| No college | 51.2 | 52.2 | 1 | 2% | 48.5-53.9 | 50.1-54.3 |
| Liberal | 39.1 | 42.7 | 3.6 | 9% | 34.5-43.7 | 38.3-47 |
| Conserv. | 47.7 | 53.5 | 5.8 | 12% | 43.7-51.7 | 50.6-56.5 |
Since these data had smaller N’s than the previous ones I put in the 95 percent confidence intervals. I bolded those with college educations because only in that case do the intervals not overlap. My general conclusion here is the difference in fundamentalism between men and women is more a difference in religiosity, and once men and women reach a certain level of religious commitment there isn’t much of a difference in outlook. If I expanded the sample to those who “believe in God but have doubts,” the sex difference crops up again, but this is because so many more men than women fall into this category proportionally.
(I checked these results with attitudes toward evolution, and they align well, but the sample sizes were even smaller so I left that out)
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