In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez documents and discusses what she calls gender data gaps. These are places where data that’s gathered from only (or mostly) men are used to make design or policy decisions that have bad effects on women because, on average they differ from men in consistent ways. Although she doesn’t ever gather them in a list like this, I think there are at least three different points at which data from women can be lost.
- Sometimes data isn’t gathered from women at all. For example, a medical researcher might decide that women are too complicated what with menstrual cycles and possible pregnancy, so they study only men and then just assume that the results generalize. Or decision-making bodies that consist of all or mostly men use their personal experience to make policy decisions, without even considering that their experience might not be representative because of their gender. For example, Criado Perez discusses governments making decisions about snow removal and public transportation and even city design with an eye toward trip patterns of commuting to work and back home that is more common among men. In so doing, they ignore or downplay the importance of a pattern more common among women where they go to multiple destinations in one trip. This is especially common among people who care for children or the elderly, which are tasks that women do far more often than men do.
- Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men, but isn’t reported in disaggregated form, so it’s not clear whether there are gender differences or not.
- Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men and is reported disaggregated, but decision-makers are still ultimately unconcerned with the differences. This is generally the case for data on harassment of political office holders that Criado Perez reports, where women holding office are harassed more often and more seriously by their colleagues and even their constituents than men holding office are, but the response of heads of legislative bodies seems to be to tell women to toughen up rather than to do anything themselves to make harassment more difficult.
Photo credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Reading this book got me to thinking about how gender data gaps might affect Church policies. Of course it’s obvious that many Church policies discriminate against women by design, for example the priesthood ban for women. But what the book made me think about is all the ways in which the Church maybe unintentionally makes policies that differentially affect women, and the decision-makers just aren’t very aware of it because they include no women (or if they do, the women know that their place is to not talk too much).
Another thing too is that in terms of the three points at which data on women might be lost that I’ve listed, the Church seems like it’s often stuck at what might be called step zero. That is, Church leaders are loath to admit that they need any data from anyone, men or women, because surely God will put into their minds everything they need to know, and they really don’t want to be troubled by input from rank-and-file members.
But that’s beside the point. What I’m going to do in the rest of this post is just list some Church policies and practices I came up with that are maybe not explicitly designed to give women a worse church experience than men, but end up doing so anyway. These are the types of things that, even without making major changes like ordaining women, could be improved if GAs (and in some cases even local leaders) closed their gender data gaps by getting more input from women.
- The requirement for endowed members to wear temple garments is much more burdensome to women than it is to men. Although they’re roughly the same shape as men’s, women’s garments are less compatible with typical clothing options available to women than men’s are with typical clothing options available to men. And that’s to say nothing of issues like yeast infections, which the cisgender men among the ranks of the GAs aren’t going to be personally familiar with. (For much more on this issue, see Angela C.’s excellent post from several years ago at BCC.) Even if getting more women’s input only meant a softening of language around how consistently garments are to be worn, it seems like this would be an improvement.
- Mothers’ lounges (or whatever the rooms are called in church buildings where women can retreat to breastfeed their children) are consistently too small, too poorly ventilated, too poorly furnished, and too frequently attached to bathrooms. Sometimes they’re non-existent. All this is anecdotal, but it seems like the pattern is so consistent that it clearly reveals a problem. If more women were asked to give input on building design, perhaps this could be fixed.
- Tithing is flat at 10% of your income, regardless of how much you make. This flatness makes it regressive, as it’s a far larger sacrifice to pay $1,000 on a $10,000 annual income than $10,000 on $100,000. As more women live in poverty than men (also documented in Invisible Women), this hits women on the whole harder than men.
- Church building thermostats are set probably nearly 100% by men. Men who are typically wearing full suits and are therefore prone to set buildings to be heated less or air-conditioned more, leaving women cold in their skirts and dresses.
- Children attend sacrament meeting with their families rather than going to a separate more age-appropriate setting, unlike in many other churches. The burden of wrangling children single-handedly falls disproportionately on women given that (1) single parents are more often women, and (2) even in two-parent families, fathers are going to be the ones who are away on the stand in the bishopric or in another ward as a high councilor.
- Anecdotally, sites for church buildings and temples seem to be often chosen with little regard to how accessible they are by public transportation. Again going back to the book, Criado Perez documents that women are more likely than men to rely on public transportation, and if a family has access to one car, the man is often the one who dominates its use.
- Adherence to a Family Proclamation norm of 1950s gender roles where a husband is employed and a wife stays at home with children hurts women a lot more than men when some fraction of marriages end in divorce. The wife is then often left having done less schooling, having had less of a career, having been more likely to have interrupted paid employment entirely, and having saved less for retirement. Of course laws around divorce and child support and even alimony try to rectify this, but they don’t succeed. Given that the vast majority of adults will have to work for pay for at least a substantial fraction of their adult life, teaching members to marry and have kids young and often burdens women more than it does men.
- The Church’s discouragement of masturbation likely affects the ability of women to have a satisfying sex life more than it does men, given that it’s typically more difficult for women than for men to discover what they enjoy sexually. Stopping women from finding this out on their own puts them at a disadvantage when they enter a sexual relationship with a partner, and then find it difficult to direct them as to what they like.
My list is just a start. If other possibilities have occurred to you, please do add them in the comments.
A somewhat delicate issue is sexual assaults– men in positions of authority are very unlikely to sympathize with a female point of view when hearing confessions and end up assigning blame & culpability to female victims
Oh, that’s an excellent point, Starfoxy. And so very sad.
Re children, women also deal with them more in the other two hours of church than men do in Primary/nursery, which is not a “day of rest.”
Service opportunities tend to fall to the women as men delegate activities, funerals, childcare, needs etc to Relief Society.
Ordinance/Sacrament disparities in single parent (mother presiding) homes highlighted in pandemic times.
Inequality in missionary service leads to inequality in gospel learning and leadership opportunities, and that follows throughout marriage and callings.
Overall theological issues with polygamy wound women and add to mental and spiritual anguish (Ghost of Eternal Polygamy by Carol Lynn Pearson; Elder Oaks’ laughing off a sister’s serious query https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2019/11/24/polygamy-lives-lds/)
Excellent points, acw. I especially appreciate your point about women getting more tasks piled on them on Sunday. But really, all great thoughts.
The furniture is not chosen with women in mind. The furniture in the foyers, if I sit with my back against the back of the chair my feet don’t quite touch the floor properly. So I have to slouch or not get any back relief. This is in contrast to the chairs in the mothers lounge which are designed for a woman to recline yet also be able to rock. The folding chairs are excruciating when you’re pregnant and need lower back support and there’s no way to put a cushion on it.
The schedule simply does not account for what to do with a child between the ages of 6 and 18 months. If they can move but they’re too young for nursery you just walk and walk and walk around while your child gets into mischief. The schedule also is not designed to be accommodating to the need for naps in small children. When my guys were very small church always fell with at least one nap in it of course because in a three hour span morning or afternoon you’re going to hit naptime. So I would sit in the mothers room rocking my baby so that he could sleep for an hour so that I could then be present and functional for my calling in the third hour. This meant that for six months straight I never had the sacrament because we do nothing to make sure that the women in the mothers lounge get the sacrament. When I pointed this out to the bishop and suggested we deputize young women to stand outside the mothers lounge to help get the sacrament to women he said he was so sorry I wasn’t getting the sacrament and he should’ve known so he could authorize my husband to do it at home. This is a personal solution for what is a systemic problem.
Women tend to live much longer than men and so you usually have a fairly large population of elderly single women with reduced mobility living in nursing homes. They might get the sacrament once a month or a message from a home teacher. But until Covid there was no remote option for participating in church. I hope that the broadcast continues. It would’ve been a game changer when my children were very small and they needed naps or running around time or were sick all the time. I think men simply cannot relate to the reality of being dependent on the goodwill of others to access the sacrament. They say all you have to do is ask ignoring the reality that asking people to make a special trip to your house every week on what might be their only day off is not easy especially if you don’t know the men well. Not all men are equally enthusiastic about bringing the sacrament to people who can’t come to church. It’s fundamentally different if the bishop can simply authorize you to administer the sacrament at home.
I hope that the pandemic will bring some long-term changes for accessibility. I hope architecturally they start designing buildings that have spaces for naps for children, spaces for toddlers to run around and that those spaces are not the foyer and have the option to have sacrament broadcast. And there should be some kind of system that would allow you to alert that there is someone inside that room who would like the sacrament. Possibly a light Above the door.
Wow, Em, thanks! I love your thoughtful and considered additions!
Em, it’s not just the chairs in the foyer. The pews in the chapel don’t work for women, who tend to be shorter than men. When our children were small, I piled all the hymnals I could reach on the floor in front of me and then rested my feet on the hymnals so that my feet would have a support that allowed me a somewhat flat lap so that my children didn’t slide off.
I completely second the acknowledgement that women must wear cold weather clothing to church in the summer because the AC is set to accommodate men wearing suits. That’s wrong on so many levels.
The Elders Quorum president is President Jones; the Primary president is Sister Jones.
When our first child was born, I was released from my calling because caring for our daughter during church meetings was considered to be inappropriate for my husband in his calling. And, of course, his calling was considered to be more important than mine.
Our ward recently announced youth summer camps for this year. The Young Men are, as always, separated into 3 groups so that the activities can grow as the young men mature. As always, there is only 1 camp scheduled for the Young Women so that all activities must be appropriate for 12 year olds.
Thanks for your additions, PWS! From your and Em’s points, and things some friends have said on Facebook, it’s striking to me how much inequity is built into church buildings themselves.
Just the garment issue alone…. sigh.
I read an article a few years ago about women who need prosthetics and learned we have far more diversity in our limbs than men do. Combine that with different breast sizes and waist-to-hip ratios, even for women of the same height and weight, and you run into sizing problems for a LOT of us.
We menstruate. Sometimes we get yeast infections. Most of us get pregnant. We take a while to stop bleeding after we give birth. We nurse and we often leak. Sometimes we get mastitis. We wear bras. Later, we get hot flashes and night sweats (this is the stage I am at right now). Sometimes we get mastectomies. That’s not even getting into the fact garments are deeply unattractive.
Obviously these are all things men don’t experience. The endowed women in the church are wearing a modernized version of 19th-century men’s underwear and we have no input.
Great points, Margot. Like you said, the garments alone are a huge deal.
The unspoken order of things as it relates to callings also tips in favour of men. The male callings are more important. There are no female type calling that outrank a male type calling. This matters when it comes to staffing callings because in primary we spend half the presidency meeting trying to keep the organization staffed. Primary is the lowest in the unofficial ranking, is run by women, and is continuously getting poached by higher ranking groups while simultaneously being the largest need for callings. This makes it almost impossible to properly staff it.
Last week we got a new bishop. The previous bishop, with a straight face, told us that no callings are more important than another, that all callings are equal. Not two sentences earlier he laughed about how one of the men in the bishopric had, only a few weeks before, been called to a position in primary. At the time, he said, he had felt that it was not then right place for him but he had allowed it to happen anyway. He was promptly released from primary and put in the bishopric.
In all my years in primary we were never allowed to “poach” people who were already in other callings. Sometimes, when we were desperate we could get a person to take a second calling (I played the organ AND primary piano for example). But we never got a person assigned to primary if that meant they had to be released from their current calling. We were poached from all the time. When I was in the primary presidency half of our meetings were staffing issues. We were always understaffed. Always having to replace people called away. We could only draw from the pool of people who didn’t yet have a calling. Other groups like YM and Stake High Council could draw from the entire ward of people since poaching from primary is fine.
Great points, Niki-La. That’s very depressing that there are so many roadblocks thrown up in the way of staffing the primary properly. I think you’re clearly spot on that they’re seen as less important generally, so (of course all-male) ward leadership often isn’t going to worry as much about them as other organizations.
Also, in case you haven’t seen it, I loved this post by Abby Hansen over at the Exponent where she takes on the idea that all callings are equal.
https://www.the-exponent.com/does-a-primary-president-have-any-real-authority/
I think callings sometimes act as a microcosm of this. There’s a talk by Elder Stevenson where he recounts his calling to be an apostle and how he told his wife, Lesa Stevenson, that he had accepted later that day:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2015/10/plain-and-precious-truths?lang=eng
The invitation to accept the calling was only extended to Elder Stevenson and Lesa Stevenson had no input, even though its a calling that would surely demand a lot of work and sacrifice from both of them. Its possible that gender data gaps are created partially due to an implicit assumption that priesthood holders speak for and represent their entire households. Its similar to an idea that floated around in anti-suffrage movements: That a woman’s vote was unnecessary because men’s votes already represented the votes of their wives.
Excellent point, Blacksheep!
Thinking more about Em’s comment about schedules. The rule that you are assigned a ward to attend and that the time that ward meets rotates every year is harder for women who are primarily in charge of getting children to church. It means that even if you can make a 2 (used to be 3) hour block work for your napping baby or toddler, come January 1, you have to start all over. Randomly having to attend church at 9AM is also hard for the sleep schedules of teen-agers who are already sleep deprived from weekday early morning seminary. My husband was already at church early for meetings when we had teen-agers and it fell to me to wake them up and convince them to get ready for church. Because men’s participation in church is relatively detached from family responsibilities, what if women were allowed to choose their family’s time of attendance. This certainly wouldn’t be easy, but rigid church schedules are harder on mothers than on fathers.
Ooh, that’s an excellent one that wasn’t at all on my radar. Thanks, KM!
When Elder Bednar gave that “Choose Not to Be Offended” talk, I spent a couple years waiting for its companion talk: “Choose Not to Be Offensive.” But of course we never got that talk. While the “choose not to be offended” talk is probably not specifically aimed at women who have friction with a priesthood holder, that’s how the principles in it are taught when we go over them in lessons. It’s always the priesthood leader’s behavior that causes the problem; and typically a woman who has to choose not to be offended. I recognize some issues really aren’t serious, but if a priesthood holder does do something that shatters a woman’s trust, she has to choose not to get offended. There is no general doctrine directing the priesthood holder to admit he’s done something wrong and offer an apology. Priesthood leaders essentially get a free pass. The ones who are decent men will apologize anyway, but if a woman has friction with an entitled priesthood leader who enjoys giving women chances to develop humility, the burden is on the woman to brush aside what may have been a very painful incident. If she struggles, then she’s blamed for not being forgiving enough.
I wish there was an official acknowledgment that priesthood leaders ought to apologize when they’ve done something hurtful or offensive. Of course, that sort of policy can’t be put in place because it would be applied to the Brethren, and the Brethren don’t apologize. That ‘no apology’ policy has trickled down. Priesthood leaders do their best, and make mistakes, and aren’t required to own up to those mistakes and say they’re sorry.
It would be an interesting exercise to survey women and ask about their experiences with ‘choosing not to be offended’, and then compare it to men and see if they’ve had similar experiences in ‘choosing not to be offended.’ I think this policy is applied to dismiss women and their concerns more often than it is to dismiss men and their concerns. Women are ‘choosing to be offended’ while men are bringing up valid issues that should be addressed.
Wow! I had never thought of how gendered the “choose not to be offended” message is, but I think you make a great case that it is. Well said, Melinda. A depressing point and an excellent one.
If the church is going to holdfast to the tradition of priesthood confession for sexual sins; women both young & old, should have the opportunity, rather option, to confess to a fellow sister. We are all individuals and have unique experiences and viewpoints. But in many situations, particularly within the realm of temptation and sin, there is a great deal of commonality and understanding within the same gender. When a GA is sent/instructed to reorganize a stake and extend the calling to a new Stake Presidency, an apostle bestows “Apostolic Keys” for that GA to fulfill the assignment. Why couldn’t a bishop & stake president temporarily bestow their keys as a Judge in Israel to a RS or YW President? A shift to this direction would accomplish a great deal of good. First of all it would significantly lighten the load of the unpaid overworked priesthood leader that typically has a young family and a taxing full-time profession. Secondly, it would provide the sisters in the leadership callings an opportunity for personal spiritual strengthening and the gift of blessing the lives of others in a profoundly Godlike (Goddesslike) way.