Religiosity and gender equality: comparing natives and Muslim migrants in Germany

Abstract

In European public debates, Islam is often described as an impediment to gender equality. By using data from surveys conducted in Germany, we analyse the role of high levels of individual religiosity in explaining Turks’ and Germans’ approval of gender equality and the way Turkish and German couples share household tasks. Results suggest that, for both groups, individuals with strong religious commitments are less likely than secular individuals to hold egalitarian gender role attitudes. At the behavioural level, this correlation between religiosity and gender egalitarianism only holds true for Turkish respondents. Furthermore, strong religious commitments contribute to generational stability in attitudinal and behavioural gender-traditionalism among Turks. However, when explaining Germans’ more egalitarian gender-related attitudes and behaviours, religiosity turns out to be just one factor among others – and not a particularly important one. Further research is needed to disentangle the different cultural and religious aspects of Muslim migrants’ attitudes and behaviours.

Keywords:

• Europe
• religion
• Islam
• gender
• immigration
• integration

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Teresa Jurado, Pia Schober and Peter Preisendörfer for carefully reading and commenting on the manuscript.

Notes

1. Although naturalized Turks were included in the German sample, they were strongly underrepresented. We therefore had to exclude them from the analyses.

2. The questionnaires are available under: www.bib-demographie.de/publikat/frame_material.html

3. The four GES items are: (1) On the whole, men make better political leaders than women (agree coded low); (2) When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women (agree coded low); (3) Do you think that a woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled or is this not necessary? (agree coded low); (4) If a woman wants a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove? (disapprove coded low). The fifth item was not in the original GES: (5) Taking care of household and children is just as satisfying as to work for money (agree coded low).

4. This was necessary due to the large differences between the groups. Most first generation Turks have no educational degree or have only completed elementary education while only a small share of Germans fall into this category.

5. Note, however, that it is impossible to assess the causal relationship between migrants’ social assimilation and their adoption of liberal gender attitudes with cross-sectional data.

6. The statistically non-significant coefficients (p=.9) for the second generation are primarily due to the small number of cases for this group.

7. In analyses not presented here we inserted into the models several indicators that have proven to be an important determinant in explaining changes in the gender division of labour over time (duration of partnership, marriage-migration, large educational gap between the partners) (see Grunow, Schulz and Blossfeld 2007), but this did not increase their explanatory power. Including income differences between the spouses was impossible due to missing cases.