Two Female Academics Blame Prayer For Women Not Being Men

Two academic women are sure the last barrier to the fall of the patriarchy---and installation of the matriarchy?---is prayer. They said so directly in their peer-reviewed paper "The Hidden Cost of Prayer: Religiosity and the Gender Wage Gap", in The Academy of Management Journal.

I neglected to memorize the authoresses names, so I will call them "Mary" and "Sue", or "Mary Sue" jointly.

Now it has to be remembered that when you hear calls for "equality" or "equity", what is really meant is desire for superiority.

For instance, now some time ago, there were once pleas for equality in college admissions for women. They got that, and now outnumber men. There are no more calls for equality now that superiority has been reached. Except in those majors where men still predominate.

It doesn't matter how many times it is demonstrated women make the same or more as men, when ability and experience are accounted for. That women don't make more means "equity" has not been reached.

Women activists never complain, for instance, of quota hires for women (such as at universities). And you never hear activists cry for true parity in places where women can't compete with men, like in sports or the military.

And you also never hear activists saying women should not be paid (and accrue vacation and "experience" time) when the take loads of time off, such as to have babies.

Never mind all that, and skip the implication of atheism and gross materialism of the title, and let's take the paper as she is, and see how evil prayer is, verified by wee p-values.

We have to wade through eighteen pages of the re-discovery that men aren't women, and women aren't men, and that religion has nothing to do with money, and all the lamentations that follow from these horrible realizations, before they get to the point.

Mary Sue does not like religion: "Religiosity espouses that men and women differ in their innate social functions, as ordained by god [sic] himself (emphasizing that god is male in nearly all religions)".

On the other hand, if you were looking for good reasons to convert to Christianity, this: "Christianity is irremediably sexist...it legitimizes male domination and violence toward women" (ellipsis original), quoting some Japanese source.

You will recall the epidemiologist fallacy, the inbred marriage between the ecological fallacy and p-values. The ecological fallacy is where X is said to cause Y, but where X is never mentioned; instead a proxy is, and everybody forgets it. P-values are used to fallaciously infer cause.

This paper contains a particularly silly version of the fallacy, common enough in grievance studies, and indeed in academic sociology as a whole.

Here, for instance, are details on their first "study", which was to examine "the effect of religiosity on the gender wage gap for countries around the world." To do this they gathered some "measures." The scare quotes emphasize these are not measures, but numbers called measures.

First, "Gender wage gap. Estimated earned income for men and women, regardless of the number of hours worked... we computed 1 minus women’s income as a percentage of men’s income for each country, so higher scores indicate a larger wage gap."

Second, "Religiosity". Gallup surveyed a handful of folks in different countries, asking "Is religion important in your daily life?" scoring it 0-1. Mary Sue used the average country number.

Those were the main "measures", but others were also used to make the regressions seem more science-like. For instance, "Social domain differentiation...Four indicators were used as proxies for the preeminence of the domestic domain for women". Ah, proxies. In other words, a direct admission the measures were non-measures. There were also dull things like GDP.

All was crammed into a regression. Results: "religiosity positively related to the gender wage gap (b = 8.47, s.e. = 1.99; p < .001)".

Sigh. This is worse than the epidemiologist fallacy: this is the double-epidemiologist fallacy. Because not only do they say X (religiosity) causes Y (wage gap), and they didn't measure X on any person, they also didn't measure Y on anybody, either.

Instead, crude country-level averages of wages and "is religion important to you?" questions are swapped in. Think how accurate a one-number summary of "religiosity" is for the States. Or one of "wage gap". It won't capture any "large scale" behavior. It will just be ridiculous. One won't predict the other. Or cause the other, which is the implication here.

Mary Sue's conclusion: "religiosity is not uniformly a benevolent force". This is surely true. The woke religion is the opposite of benevolent.

Speaking on that wokeness, Mary Sue, here taking the role of unknowing priestesses, say: "In recent decades, societies, organizations, and individuals alike have progressed toward the view that men and women can contribute equally."

Because men and women are not the same, they cannot "contribute equally". They can each do what the other cannot, which since this maximizes Diversity, should be reason to cheer.

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