Women's Work Force Status and Church Attendance

The persistent sex differential in church attendance found by many researchers has often been attributed to differential labor force participation. Using 1980 survey data from the National Opinion Research Center, this paper explores the effect of workforce status of women on their church attendance. While there is indeed a statistically significant mean attendance differential between working and nonworking women, it is not due to coefficient differences in the explanatory variables, but is due to differences in the mean values of certain of the significant explanatory variables, particularly religious intensity, spouse of the same denomination, age, presence of young children in the household, and membership in non-mainline denominations. Thus, the rise in female labor force participation cannot generate long term projections of declining attendance on that basis alone.