Women bow down before the male god

On another weblog someone alluded to the sex difference in religious belief among black Americans, to the effect that it was more pronounced than among whites. Is this true? I decided to check the GSS, and found something interesting, though not too surprising. It’s a robust cross-cultural finding that women are more religious than men, and it holds for the United States. But how does it break down across demographics?

As you can see women are more religious than men across various population segments in a rather consistent manner. Contrary to the intuition of some there is actually less difference among blacks than among whites. In fact inspection seems to show that the more secular a class is, the greater the sex difference. In other words, secularization seems to effect males to a greater extent than females within any give class. The diagram below illustrates it for the population segments above:

The pattern held when I did log-transformations. In any case, below are the data broken down by year. Some of the N’s are small, so with caution, and for “entertainment purposes only.” All the years show the percentage who “Know God Exists.”