Religious affiliation and women's workforce participation

As a possible partial answer to the question raised in the last post of factors which have influenced increased women's economic participation, the rise in secularisation of society may be one. A paper in a leading economic journal in 2003 ("People's Opium? Religion and Economic Attitudes") found that people who were actively religious or even just raised religiously were more likely than non-religious people to think that:

1. When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women
2. Women should have children in order to be fulfilled
3. Being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay
4. A university education is more important for a boy than a girl

The authors split the results by religion for questions 1 and 4, and find that Muslims tend to agree most with them, followed by Hindus, then Catholics, and then Protestants. Members of the smaller religions have wide variation in their opinions. There may be some advantage in religious expansion through supporting the views, perhaps through increasing family size. Being an atheist significantly lowers agreement with the statements. Women have obtained more prime ministerial and presidential positions in countries with the large religions as the largest belief systems than in formally atheist countries or countries associated with smaller religions, so there may be some political-economic trade off or internal social tensions at work.

The paper is not available online, but the survey data it is based on is free at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/. There is considerable variation by country, and some of the results can be surprising. The data covers much more than just attitudes to women or religion.