Gender and religious orientation

Gender has been proven to be a substantial indicator of differences with respect to religiosity within Christianity. Females are always more frequentlyand intensively religious in comparison to males (Francis, 1997). The question of whether this holds for other religions remains unanswered. In this study we focus on university students in Catholic, Christian Orthodox andMuslim environments of Central Europe and in an American, predominantly Protestant environment. Religiosity is studied by differentiating between intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity (Allport and Ross, 1967). If it were foundthat females are more social-extrinsic religious, one couldspeak of a sociological, instrumental and situational religiosity among females. On the contrary, one is closer to speaking of an immanent difference between the genders. Sociological (with the exception of socialization) and Freudian explanations are not confirmed. Psychological explanations, which include anxiety, authoritarianism and femininity (Bem,1981) are good at explaining thedifferences in religiosity between the genders