The Equality is not a Feeling, 10.0 post teased out some data about the doctrinal density of General Conference talks given by male versus female church leaders. Today’s post is an extension of that post.
Using the metric described in Equality is not a Feeling, 10.0, here is a list of the 50 most scripture-using speakers–using speakers who have given 3+ conference talks. Recall that male speakers average 5.0 verses per page while females average 2.3 verses per page.
The chart below depicts what we should expect to see–even taking into account that there are so many fewer female than male speakers. We should expect to see a far greater number of female speakers in the top 50. However, we see only two.
Given that this list is drawn from a pool of 32 women and 140 men, the probability that 1 or fewer women would be in the top 50: 0.00009 (determined by 1 million bootstrap replications).
Several people made some great comments in response to the Equality is not a Feeling, 10.0 post–suggesting reasons for this pattern. And of course, the issue is very complex and we are simply speculating as to the explanations for this pattern. However, I definitely think that one plausible explanation is that women are not in leadership positions in the church and are less likely to serve missions–which is where plenty of Mormon men learn the scriptures.
[To see more Equality is not a Feeling posts, see the archive.]