Paid Work

• Bruce (1996; 2011) argues that women's religiosity is a result of their lower levels of involvement in paid work. He links this to secularisation processes such as rationalisation.

  Over the past two centuries, this has gradually driven religion out of the male-dominated public sphere of work, confining it to the private sphere of family and personal life - the sphere that women are more concerned with.

  As religion has become privatised, so men's religiosity has declined more quickly than women's.
• However, by the 1960s, many women had also taken on secular, masculinised roles in the public sphere of paid work, and this led to what Callum Brown (2009) calls 'the decline of female piety': women too were withdrawing from religion.

  Yet, despite the decline, religion remains more attractive to women than to men for at least two reasons:
• • Religion has a strong affinity with values such as caring for others. Women continue to have a primary role in caring for the young and old, both in the private sphere of the family and also in the kind of paid work they often do.
• • Men's withdrawal from religion in the last two centuries meant that the churches gradually became feminised spaces that emphasise women's concerns such as caring and relationships. Woodhead (2001) argues that this continues to make religion more attractive to women. The introduction of women priests in the Church of England in 1994 and women bishops in 2015 may have reinforced this.
• To consider other reasons for the greater appeal of religion to women, we shall now focus on three specific examples: the New Age, sects, and Pentecostalism.