From Religiosity to Atheism, How Gender Shapes Non-Belief

Past research on the sociology of religion has shown that women are generally more religious than men. This pattern appears to be robust and it has often been proposed by researchers as a universal fact, at least in Western societies. Increasingly however, researchers have become interested in the beliefs of not just the religious, but also the “nones”, individuals that are unaffiliated with any organized religion. In particular, I am interested in understanding what drives the beliefs of those that are not just unaffiliated with religious organizations or agnostics, but those that explicitly identify as atheists. A first step in this process was, therefore, to examine whether a similar gender pattern emerged for individuals that reported that they were atheists. Using data collected from the World Values Survey (WVS) Wave 6 to create binary regression models, I compared examined atheism and related factors across nine countries. I found that across most of the countries, women were on average less likely to be atheist than men, all other things being equal.