Why do we devalue women's work in Christian Institutions?
I reflect on the recent CT article about women's (mostly nonexistent) pay in churches and experiences of women in Christian colleges & universities
Did your jaw drop when you read Jen Wilkin’s Christianity Today recent article Honor Thy Church Mothers—With Wages?
Mine did. I read it for the first time last night, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
In case you missed it, Wilkin highlighted the recent State of Ministry To Women Lifeway research report. If you are unfamiliar with this report, it studied over “1000 evangelical and Black Protestant female churchgoers and 842 women’s ministry leaders in the U.S.” The report was conducted last spring (April & May 2023) and includes “respondents or their churches who have interacted with Lifeway in some way in the last 3 years.” Since Lifeway is the publishing arm of the SBC, it seems likely that many of these women are in churches that support SBC beliefs about women. They are complementarian, in other words. If you aren’t sure what that means, the about tab on lifeway.com will take you to “Lifeway’s Doctrinal Guideline” which is the SBC Baptist Faith and Message. It states, “The husband and wife are of equal worth before God….A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.” Men lead and women follow. Men are directed to provide for their families and women are directed to serve in managing the home.
Isn’t that interesting?
Have you thought about the implications of a theology that argues men are to provide and women are to take care of the home and the connection to women being paid less in the workplace?
I have. In fact, I think I wrote a book about it…..
But let's return to the Lifeway report. A large proportion of the respondents were SBC women: “the 466 SBC responses were weighted down to reflect their correct proportion of evangelical and Black Protestant churches.” (This actually raises a question for me—what was the statistic for women paid in SBC churches alone, since 466 of the respondents were SBC women?—although the report states that the sample provides “95% confidence that the sampling error does not exceed +5.8%. This margin or error accounts for the effect of weighting.” Anyway, I still want to know.) In addition to positive statistics, such as 90% of churchgoing women say their church invests and equips them (with 63% strongly agreeing), it also reveals that 83% of women’s ministry leaders are volunteers or unpaid staff members.
Let me say that again. Of 842 women working in ministry in Black Protestant and evangelical (predominantly Southern Baptist) churches, only 17% receive any sort of renumeration.
The staggering implications of this percentage are compounded by the following statistic that only 5% of these female leaders reported planning together with the broader church staff.
Women leaders are not only excluded from the table in ministry planning at churches, but they are mostly expected to contribute their services without any pay. While the survey “does not compare women’s ministry leaders’ pay to that of other staff members with similar responsibilities, Wilkin suspects what I suspect too: that women are paid significantly less for men for doing the same work. “Anecdotally I can tell you of women in these roles learning that their male counterparts were being paid as much as twice their compensation,” writes Wilkin. Anecdotally I can tell you about a conversation I just had with a female ministry leader at a very prominent SBC church who was paid significantly less for her work. I will reach out to her and ask her if I can share her story.
Y’all, my head is exploding right now. I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was this bad. I’m so grateful for Jen Wilkin and Christianity Today publicizing these results and indicating the severity of their implications. Wilkin summarizes it so well: “They often serve without recognition, without compensation, and without resources.”
Yet, as the same report shows, these women are vital to the health of our churches.
A few years ago I wrote two articles (one for the Anxious Bench and one for Christianity Today) that tackled similar research on the state of women in Christian higher education.
This is what I found:
Karen Swallow Prior spoke out against the “Billy Graham rule”–married men distancing themselves from women to avoid temptation and the appearance of evil. For those of you who missed Prior’s article, she eloquently argued that good moral character is better than rigid behavioral rules. As she writes, “Virtue ethics relies on moral character that is developed through good habits rather than rules or consequences for the governing of behavior...Virtue ethics is better than the Billy Graham rule.”
I actually just learned about the Billy Graham rule a few years ago. I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two Baylor history graduate students and overheard the phrase. So I asked what the Billy Graham rule was (just FYI: advanced graduate students, especially graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams, can answer fluently almost any question within their given field of study). They briefly summarized for me what Billy Graham decided in 1948 and later articulated in his autobiography: “We all knew of evangelists who had fallen into immorality while separated from their families by travel. We pledged among ourselves to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. From that day on, I did not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife. We determined that the Apostle Paul’s mandate to the young pastor Timothy would be ours as well: ‘Flee...youthful lusts’ (2 Timothy 1:22, KJV).”
Suddenly, after hearing the Billy Graham rule explained for the first time, lots of things within my gendered evangelical world made sense. I felt, as my 8th grade self would have said, “Duh!”
It isn’t surprising that Karen Swallow Prior’s article, not to mention the criticism that followed it, caught my attention. It made me think about the implications of the Billy Graham rule for women in Christian academia. It also made me think about the words of another famous Christian who died just a few years after Billy Graham began his crusades: Dorothy L. Sayers.
For those of you unfamiliar with Dorothy Sayers, you should change that. I know as an educated Christian and medievalist, I should say that my favorite authors are C.S. Lewis and Augustine. But that wouldn’t be true (although I am a fan of both). My favorite authors are Homer (the Iliad) and Dorothy Sayers. Medieval scholar, Christian theologian, mystery writer, contemporary of Tolkien and Lewis, and one of the first female graduates of Oxford University, Sayers was truly an exceptional woman. Her writing style reflects (at least what I consider) her personality: sensible, passionate, judicious.
In 1938 Sayers was asked to address a Woman’s Society. What she argued, in her essay “Are Women Human?”, was profound–that women should not be categorized by their biological difference from men but considered by their sameness as humans.
“A woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
When we isolate and objectify women because of their sex, we deny women their humanity. As Sayers continued, “Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general.” When Dorothy Sayers was asked how she wrote male conversations so well, even though she was a woman, she responded that she simply wrote men like the ordinary human beings they were, quipping that “women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.” Women, for Dorothy Sayers, were simply human–just like men.
Yet women, simply because they are women, have found academia to be an unwelcoming world.
In 2013, Stanford psychiatry professor Cheryl Gore- Felton launched a research study to examine why women are so underrepresented in senior faculty ranks at American universities. Preliminary research suggests that one reason female academics are marginalized is because they are excluded from male relationships (the “old boy” networks).
As Gore-Felton writes, “If most of the senior ranks are still men, how are women able to. . .navigate that? Who will they network with? Who is going to guide them and mentor them?”
Gore-Felton, of course, is speaking about the gender gap throughout academia. What about the gender gap in Christian Colleges and Universities in which ideas like the Billy Graham rule are more likely to flourish? Research suggests that women are even more underrepresented in leadership roles and tenured faculty positions at the 105 institutions making up the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities. In 2002, women held only 14% of leadership positions at CCCU schools; only 33% of CCCU faculty were women; only 1/3 of those female faculty were tenured (as compared to 50% of male faculty); and women faculty were paid 20% to 25% less than men. As the authors of the 2009 Women in Academic Leadership: Professional Strategies, Personal Choices have summarized: “Research has implicated a glass ceiling for women aspiring to academic leadership in CCCU institutions....[in 2005] there are only three women presidents out of CCCU’s 105 member colleges and universities.” There are probably a myriad of reasons that help explain the greater gender disparity within leadership and tenured faculty at CCCU schools. But perhaps it is time for Christian academics to seriously examine the implications of ideas like the Billy Graham rule on their female colleagues.
As Women In Academic Leadership observes about faith-based institutions, “What a denomination believes about women and their role in society will be evident at every level of their college or university and thus shape the campus climate for women.”
“What a denomination believes about women and their role in society will be evident” in how they treat women. Hmmm…….
I’m still grappling with the implications of the State of Ministry to Women report. But, believe me, you will see me discuss it again. For the time being, let me share a quote from The Making of Biblical Womanhood (p. 19).
“The claim is certainly that women’s work (from housework to childcare to answering phones) is valuable and worthy, but when that same work is deemed unsuitable for a man to do, it reveals the truth: women’s work is less important than men’s. Moreover, just as men are demeaned for doing women’s jobs (which often come with less authority and, consequently, lower pay), women are restricted from doing men’s jobs (which garner both more authority and higher pay). In this way Christian patriarchy models the patriarchy of mainstream society.”
For more than six years I have been actively working to help evangelical churches more broadly and the Southern Baptist world more specifically understand the implications of theology that subordinates women to men. To help them understand that it is simple, secular patriarchy. I have received so much hostility to this idea from both male and female leaders within the evangelical world……
Yet here we are.
83% of women ministry leaders are not paid for their ministry work.
83% of women ministry leaders who have interacted in someway with Lifeway—the publishing branch of the SBC which fiercely argues a theology that not only subordinates women to men but also portrays men as the provider and women as managing the household—are not paid for their ministry work.
466 of the women in this survey identified as SBC. This survey was from late last Spring, ending a few days before the SBC 2023 began. Which means that the same convention who voted in a landslide to disfellowship churches with female pastors not only heavily depends on female labor but does not financially compensate the female leaders they allow to serve.
83% of women ministry leaders are not paid for their ministry work, according to a survey of women leaders (466 of which are Southern Baptist) who have interacted recently with Lifeway, the publishing branch of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Probably that sentence could have been my entire post.
The data on the unpaid work contributed by women is staggering - thank you for bringing it to my attention! I'm also curious what a study of nondenominational churches would reveal. In my experience, they often function as SBC but without formal attachment. Intriguingly, they often do not explicitly state their views on the roles of women, rather, a review of Staff and Elders reveal their position. Case in point: I was on the unpaid (including the Director) Women's Ministry Board at a megachurch. The church categorized me internally as a "high capacity volunteer (HCV)." Not having input into the planning and strategy at the church level eventually burnt me out - being treated as a grunt while having the responsibility of leadership wears on you.
When you see numbers like 83% unpaid, it’s hard not to notice the through-line from the early church to now. Women once led house churches, preached, baptized, and stewarded communities. Then came the imperial church, canon law, and centuries of theology designed to erase their authority. Now we call it “women’s ministry” and act surprised that the work is still unpaid. The system was built to keep women’s labor as holy but not billable.