It is not that uncommon to hear people referencing the link between religion and the treatment of women, and usually the two things are not positively correlated. I wanted to check whether or not this stereotype stands up to scrutiny. And to data. This one’s going to be short (but not so sweet). Let’s have a look, shall we?
The Sources
I decided to use three different indices to see if the findings were consistent across a number of measures of inequality. Here is a handy dandy little table with the data sources I used, along with a brief description of each index:
| Index | Publisher | Description |
| GGGR | World Economic Forum | This index focuses on
– gaps rather than levels (for example, the Index measures the size of the gap between male and female enrolment rates, but not for overall levels of education). – outcome rather than input variables (for example indicators related to country-specific policies, rights or culture, factors considered “inputs”, are not included). – measuring gender equality rather than women’s empowerment (rewards when outcomes for women equal those for men, but neither reward nor penalize cases in which women are outperforming men) |
| GII | UNDP | The GII is an inequality index. It shows the loss in potential human development due to disparity between female and male achievements in empowerment and economic status. Overall, the GII reflects how women are disadvantaged in these dimensions |
| GDI | UNDP | The GDI measures differences between male and female achievements health, measured by female and male life expectancy at birth; education, measured by female and male expected years of schooling for children and female and male mean years of schooling for adults ages 25 and older; and equitable command over economic resources, measured by female and male estimated earned income |
| Religiosity index | WIN – Gallup | A survey by WIN/Gallup International which explores religious beliefs of over 66.000 people in 68 countries across the world. |
The Data
The world is God’s playground. At least, that is what the Win/Gallup pool data shows. On average, 60% of the population in any one country is religious; however there are sizeable differences between nations. The least religious countries are China, where only 9% of the population say they believe in God, and Japan (13%). Compare this to Thailand, where 98% of the population is religious and where your religion is written on your ID card, and Nigeria, where 97% of the population is made up of believers.
The prevalence of religious beliefs does not appear to be clustered geographically. However developed regions do tend to have lower levels of religiosity overall, although this is not the case for all countries. For example, Italy or Greece have quite a high proportion of believers, at 70% and 73% of the population respectively, while some developing countries have a lower level: take Estonia or China for example, where the figures are 28% and 9%.
Since all indices are measured on a scale, I decided to rebase them to 1. For example, I assume the country with the lowest score in religiosity to be a 0, and the one with the highest to be 100. I then scale the values for all countries.
If we analyse the data distributions (see charts above), religiosity seems to be pretty evenly distributed across the spectrum, while GII and GDI, the two UNDP indicators, present a skew towards positive values. Of the tree gender inequality indicators, the GGR is the one whose distribution most resembles a normal one. The values for the three indices have been rebased to 1, with higher values indicating lower gender disparity. I used simple (that is, not rebased) religiosity data for this chart. Thus we can say that, for example, there are 11 countries where between 20 and 30% of the population believes in God.
The analysis
I have about 65 data points for each of the indices, the data looks to me fairly distributed, there are no obvious extreme outliers skewing the results. I simply run a regression with religiosity as the independent variable and one of the inequality measures as the independent variable.
The findings are consistent: the higher the religiosity, the lower the country scores in terms of gender equality. The power of the regression as measured by the R^2 is quite high.
I was brought up catholic, however I now consider myself a flaming atheist. I think everybody should be entitled to believe in whatever they want, however belief systems should be kept out of social and political life, and religion should not play a part in defining laws nor have any bearings on how people who do not believe live their lives. It can be hard to disentangle the effects of religion from culture and traditions, however I think that such efforts are warranted, especially if we want our society to be pluralistic, open and accepting.
With my opinion of religion out of the way, let’s have a look at the results of this analysis. Correlation does not imply causation, however it is interesting to note the existence and the strength of negative relationship between the variables. It is also worth noting that the correlation is present when using all three of the indices, and albeit the power of the relationship varies, all the correlation coefficients are statistically significant. From looking at the charts, we can say that higher religious prevalence in a country is correlated with higher gender inequality. I will let you draw your own conclusions from this. Over and out.
Opinionated 