Why do women give better conference talks than men?

Tamara W. Runia, who’s serving as First Counselor in the YW General Presidency, gave by far my favorite talk of April’s General Conference. I also enjoyed her previous talk in 2023. She’s dueling with Patrick Kearon in my head for my current favorite speaker. And in the previous General RS Presidency, I loved Conference talks from both counselors, Sharon Eubank and Reyna I. Aburto. It occurred to me that there are more women giving strikingly good Conference talks (at least in my view) than there are men, perhaps not in absolute numbers, but certainly as a percentage of the total numbers of women and men giving talks.

Why might this be so? I’ve come up with a couple of lists of reasons. The first is a list of hows, that outline the characteristics of their talks where I feel like they outdo men. The second is a list of whys. These are my guesses about what the causes might be behind the hows that make their talks different.

How

• Women speakers are less often doctrinaire than men are, less prone to try to lay down the law of This Is The Way Things Are. They seem more often to frame the advice they give as advice, rather than as commandment.
• Women seem more often concerned with interpersonal connection, and less concerned with hierarchy, even Church hierarchy. Some men seem deeply concerned with members’ submission to Church hierarchy, and to them in particular. They are the Oracles of the Most High God, and they are darn well going to remind us of it. I find this extremely grating.
• It’s my impression that women are more likely to address people who are out of the Church’s main target demographic, which seems to be young couples who are raising young children. They’re more open to acknowledging that people might be unmarried or widowed or even gay, or that they might be lonely or depressed.
• Women are less prone to repeating their stories or even virtually entire talks, as some men do.

Why

• Women serving as General Officers aren’t called for life, like the Q15 are, or for potentially long periods of time like Seventies are. This has several important effects:
  
  • Regarding my last point above, they know from the beginning that their chances to speak in Conference will be limited. They’re likely to be more focused on getting their best and most important messages out every time, rather than phoning it in as Q15 members sometimes do near the ends of their lives, when they’ve given dozens of Conference talks, and probably thousands of talks in total, and they’ve run out of new things to say.
  • They’re nearly always younger than Q15 members, meaning they’re closer to being in touch with the issues of the moment.
  • They’ve almost certainly spent substantial time with ordinary rank-and-file members much more recently than most GAs have, and certainly Q15 members. There isn’t much general-level hierarchy for women leaders to move through, and there’s much less celebrity status attached to their calling, so they probably fairly recently attended church as almost ordinary members. Q15 members mostly haven’t attended church as ordinary members for several decades at least, and it shows in how dismissive they often are of our concerns.
• They are women. This right up front makes them outsiders in the Church, where they’re just accessories to men. I suspect this makes them more aware of how other people might feel like outsiders in the Church.
• As women, they know there’s no more hierarchy progress they can make. It seems like there are always a few Seventies who are gunning for Q15 membership by showing how harsh they can be. The women know that promotion is off the table for them, so they don’t have to worry about it.
• They are sometimes single. This is another huge way they differ from men at the top of the Church. To climb in the Church hierarchy as a man, it’s pretty clear that your life needs to be quite cookie-cutter. You need to have served a mission (although of course if you’re old enough, this was less of a requirement) and be married and have kids and have held Church leadership positions. If you’re single as a man, you can’t even be a bishop, so your hierarchy-climbing ends at the beginning. Single women leaders can bring a dramatically different perspective from men leaders, for whom life has largely gone as they planned.
• Unlike men, they probably don’t feel the weight of having to be the ones who lay down the law. I can feel some sympathy for the men, who as misguided as I think their efforts often are, sometimes clearly feel it’s their job to give members the bad news that God is angry with us. The women in leadership know they’re off the hook for this, so perhaps they feel less need to be harsh.
• Women in the workplace are often praised more when they’re seen as approachable and willing to listen to people, consensus-builders. Men in the workplace are often praised when they’re seen as aggressive and decisive. Given how much the Church’s structure has borrowed from workplace norms, it wouldn’t be surprising if these gendered norms leaked into Church leadership too, leading to women in leadership being more agreeable and men in leadership less so.

Of course you might disagree with my premise that women even give better talks. For every Sharon Eubank or Chieko N. Okazaki I can point to, you can remind me of Julie B. Beck’s “Mothers Who Know,” or Sheri L. Dew’s “Are We Not All Mothers?” or Margaret D. Nadauld reminding YW that they should be less assertive and more submissive. And of course on the men’s side, it’s not all Boyd K. Packer and Dallin H. Oaks. There’s also Dieter F. Uchtdorf and Patrick Kearon.

In any case, I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether you agree with me that women on average are giving better Conference talks than men. Also, whether you agree with me or not, I’d like to know what you think reasons might be for one gender to do better than the other, and what you think of the ones I suggested.