So a week or so back, Statistics Canada released the data from the 2011 National Household Survey (which is what we have to work with since the long-form census was scrapped). I took a look at the overall data regarding religion in a previous post, and now I’ll dig a little deeper into it. This time, I’ll take a look at the sex distribution.
Let me also get the standard disclaimers out of the way: this is survey data, not census data. The survey was attached to the census, but it was optional, and the response rates weren’t really all that great. Also, the religion question was notoriously badly worded, which means that “no religion” numbers were probably underestimated. The question form was also peculiar: it had a space to write in whatever you pleased, or you could check a box for “no religion”. Unsurprisingly, most people checked the box rather than actually specifying their beliefs (or lack thereof), so there is no way to separate those who actually have no religion from the “spiritual but not religious”.
Alright, now that the disclaimers are out of the way, let’s look at the data!
2011 Canada National Household Survey religion results.
The big picture is not particularly surprising: more women are religious than men (52.3% versus 47.7%). That’s a trend that you see in most Western nations. Whether that’s because of innate differences, cultural pressures, or simply a lack of attention by atheist outreach programs, I am neither qualified nor inclined to guess.
2011 Canada National Household Survey religion results by sex.
In fact, women dominate pretty much every religion, across the board, except Islam (48.7% women), Sikhism (49.6%) and Hinduism (49.7%). Men also dominate half of the Christian Orthodox and Reformed sects, and a couple of the smaller Catholic (not Roman Catholic) sects, as well as Jainism (48.6% women), Zoroastrianism (49.1%) and Taoism (44.9%). Interestingly, around three quarters of Rastafarians (71.6%) and Satanists (75.1%) are men. The only other religion where men dominate is… Scientology (57.2%). That’s a little embarrassing.
Another interesting fact about women’s religious preferences is that women seem to be more willing to explore “alternative options” than the men. Some of the religions with significant women majorities are: “New Thought-Unity-Religious Science” (73.3% women… but where the fuck did that religion come from?), Wicca (73.0%) and Shinto (72.1%).
But of course, let’s not make the same mistake our news media did; let’s not forget the nones.
The nones.
Overall, there are quite a bit more non-religious men than women (53.8% versus 46.2%). This is basically all due to people who checked the “No religion” box on the form, because that accounts for almost 99% of the nones – of those using the checkbox, 53.7% were men and 46.3% were women.
A much bigger proportion of men specifically identified as “agnostic” (56.6%) and especially “atheist” (63.2%), and men seem to be much more likely to use other labels for non-religion (73.6%). I am quite surprised by the enormous gender imbalance among people who self-identify as atheist. It would seem there is a lot of work to be done convincing women to wear the scarlet ‘A’. The disparity was smaller for “Humanist” (52.5% male, 47.5% female), but still quite significant.
Here is the part I found most interesting, though.
The nones, by both sex and immigration status.
When you look at the gender differences of non-immigrant and immigrant nones separately, it turns out that there is less gender imbalance among new Canadians than there is among native-born Canadians. Among native-born Canadian nones, 54.3% are male while 45.7% are female, but among immigrated Canadians the ratio is 51.8% to 48.2%. In both cases, the numbers are dominated by the people who checked the “no religion” box. Immigrant women are slightly less likely to call themselves “agnostic” than non-immigrant women, just as likely to call themselves “atheist”, and slightly more likely to pick a different label. But there are actually more immigrant women who identify as “Humanist” than men.
In general, you can see that we have a gender disparity problem across the board, with men being more likely than women to consider themselves non-religious. We have a particular problem with getting women to explicitly call themselves “atheist”, though the label “Humanist” seems to be doing alright. Interestingly, the problem is less pronounced among new Canadians than it is among non-immigrants, though whether that’s because we’re doing a better job reaching them or because they’re bringing their atheism here I couldn’t guess.
It would seem that it might be worthwhile to reach out to Canadian women, and specifically those who aren’t immigrants. We need to not just convince them to walk away from religion, but also to make it more comfortable to actually label themselves “atheist”. Atheism is not a man’s game, and never was, but perhaps we need to do a better job getting that message out.
