Mormon Women, By the Numbers.

The Dashboard

Mormon women, in eight numbers.

Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study interviewed 565 Latter-day Saints, 308 of them women (margin of error ±7.5 points for women, ±9.7 for men). Read the margins honestly: a women-versus-men gap needs roughly 12 points to be individually significant, and Pew flags only the stay-at-home-mother item as significant. The consistent direction across eighteen items is the finding.

Test one · A say

Oppressed women don’t get a say. These women chose the arrangement.

Only men are ordained to the priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; women therefore do not serve as bishops, elders or apostles. If that arrangement were imposed on unwilling women, the women would oppose it more than the men. The record runs the other way. In Pew’s dedicated survey of Mormons, 87% opposed ordaining women — and women were more opposed than men, 90% to 84%. Among the most religiously committed, 95% opposed; even among the least committed, 69% did. Verified

The 2015 Mormon Gender Issues Survey, assembled by church-affiliated academics with about 50,000 self-selected respondents, found 72% opposed when asked directly — and 77% willing to support ordination if the prophet announced it (men 86%, women 73%). It is a convenience sample and is labeled as such. Public claim Even self-identified Mormon feminists are mostly in the pews: a Dialogue survey of 1,862 found most believing and engaged in their congregations, 84% expecting women to hold the priesthood someday, and 12% having participated in Ordain Women. Public claim

The same pattern holds on the home. In Pew’s 2011 survey, 58% of Mormons preferred a marriage in which the husband provides and the wife runs the home — nearly double the national 30% — and Mormon men and women held that view in equal measure, with no difference by age and the highest support among college graduates (71%). Verified By 2023–24, the women had moved further than the men. Sixty-six percent of Latter-day Saint women call more women in the workforce a change for the better (men: 56%). Asked whether children are better off with a parent at home, 86% of men said yes against 70% of women; asked which parent, 50% of men said the mother, against 33% of women — the one gender difference Pew’s report singles out as statistically significant. Twenty-seven percent of women, nearly double the men’s 14%, say children do just as well when both parents work. Verified Women who were being told what to think would echo the men. These women are to the men’s left on every gender question Pew asked.

A say in the arrangement is not the same as a microphone, and here the numbers side with her. At the October 2026 General Conference, women gave 3 of 37 talks (8%) and offered at least 2 of the 8 prayers. Verified Women did not pray in General Conference at all until April 2013; the three-women-per-conference norm dates to 2018; secondary tallies put women at roughly 7% of talks over 30 years and about 10% of speaking time since 2018 — flat, not rising — and the discontinuation of the Saturday evening sessions reduced the total hours women teach the whole church. Public claim The mechanism is structural rather than a muzzle: nine women hold general-officer callings against more than a hundred men eligible to speak. That explains the ratio. It does not make the pews feel it differently, which is Parcell’s point — and the series will publish its own conference-by-conference count, 1971 to present, as the verified series.

What the doctrine says, and how it changed

The church’s own instruction has moved toward the women. The 1995 proclamation on the family assigns fathers to “preside” and mothers primary responsibility for nurture, then binds both to “help one another as equal partners.” A 2013 Ensign article by Valerie Hudson and Richard Miller states that presiding carries no right of final say — equal counsel requires equal consent. In 2019, the temple ceremony was changed so that women covenant directly to God rather than to “hearken” to their husbands, and women became official witnesses at baptisms and sealings. Kline’s point stands alongside this: the word “preside” was retained and even added to the sealing ceremony the same year. Both are true. Documented

Test three · Miserable

Oppressed women are miserable. These are among the happiest women in America.

Pew’s 2023–24 landscape study asked Americans to rate their happiness, their family lives and how often they feel a deep sense of spiritual peace. BYU researchers Jenet Erickson, Justin Dyer and Barbara Morgan Gardner broke those answers out by religion and gender in Research Report 25-01, “U.S. Latter-day Saint Women’s Well-being and Religiosity.” Their figures, published in their own summary of the report: Latter-day Saint women had the highest rate of any religious group’s women for being “very happy,” 35%; 77% of Latter-day Saint mothers and 68% of single Latter-day Saint women feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being at least weekly; only 6% of single women seldom or never do; 5% of married Latter-day Saint women said they were “not too happy,” lower than other groups; and Latter-day Saint women and mothers had the highest shares rating their family lives “excellent,” 27% and 30%. The mechanism they identify is religiosity itself — the same women who pray and attend at the highest rates report the highest well-being. Public claim

The marriages, measured

Oppression inside a marriage is a claim about power, and there is a body of research that measures exactly that. The largest Latter-day Saint-specific study is Dean Busby and David Dollahite’s analysis in BYU Studies Quarterly 59:1 (2020), drawing on the RELATE questionnaire: 16,116 respondents in serious relationships, 36% of them Latter-day Saint, with 5,432 highly religious members, compared against Catholics, Protestants and the unaffiliated while controlling for education and race. Highly religious Latter-day Saints scored significantly lower on negative communication — a partner’s criticism, contempt and defensiveness — and significantly higher on emotional connection, on relationship stability, and on a seven-item satisfaction scale that explicitly includes satisfaction with “the equality in the relationship.” The mechanism the authors identify is doctrinal: temple marriage requires a standard of personal conduct that ties religious worship directly to how a person treats a spouse. The study’s limits travel with it — RELATE users are people seeking relationship feedback, not a random sample — and so does its sharpest concession: Latter-day Saints who are not highly religious scored worse than other low-religiosity groups on the same measures. Verified

The best data on who decides is cross-tradition. “The Ties That Bind” (Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute, 2019) analyzed couples in eleven countries using the World Values Survey and the Global Family and Gender Survey. Women in highly religious couples reported more joint decision-making than women in less or mixed-religious couples; highly religious couples reported the highest relationship quality and sexual satisfaction, with women about 50% more likely to be strongly satisfied sexually; and in the report’s J-curve, the women reporting the highest relationship quality of all were traditionalists in highly religious relationships. Verified In the report’s table of religious traditions, Latter-day Saints posted the highest relationship-quality score of any group — 17.24 against 16.36 for Protestants. Public claim

Samuel Perry’s 2016 study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion explains why the oppression reading misfires on these households. In a national sample, traditional gender ideology does lower relationship satisfaction — but only among the less religious. Among highly religious couples the penalty disappears, and the moderating effect is significant for women specifically. Public claim The older record agrees: Lehrer and Chiswick’s 1993 analysis in Demography found member-to-member couples had the lowest five-year divorce rate of any pairing studied, 13%, while members married to non-members had the highest, 40%. Public claim General Social Survey data compiled in the 1980s put married Latter-day Saints at 66% “very happy” in marriage, against 65% of Protestants and Catholics and 57% of the non-religious, with Latter-day Saint women reporting more marital happiness than other women. Documented

Harvard’s Global Flourishing Study, the largest instrument in this series, points the same way on family: U.S. Latter-day Saints reported the highest rates in that study of having felt loved by their mother (94%) and father (90%) growing up. The nuance travels with the citation, as it does on every page of this series: in the study’s worldwide data, Latter-day Saints rank highest on meaning and purpose but notably weaker on the combined mental-and-physical- health domain. Verified

The depression question

The claim that Mormon women are unusually depressed dates to a 1979 Salt Lake television special and gained national life when Express Scripts ranked Utah first in antidepressant use in 2001 and again in 2007. The ranking is real. It is also a measure of a state in which roughly 70% of residents were on church rolls and far fewer were active — and Maine and Oregon posted comparably high use with no comparable religious story. Under this series’ rules, a Utah statistic is a Utah statistic: never upgraded to a claim about the faith, in either direction. Utah proxy The studies that measured Latter-day Saint women directly — Spendlove, West and Stanish (1984, Beck Depression Inventory, Salt Lake Valley), Williams (1999, Latter-day Saint vs. Protestant women), Johnson (2004, national samples) — found no difference or lower depression, with one finding lower self-esteem; Daniel Judd’s literature reviews spanning 1923 to 2022 report no standardized-measure study linking Latter-day Saint belief or practice to higher depression. Documented Nearly all of this body is BYU-affiliated, and the honest statement is the narrow one: the claim is contradicted by every direct measurement on record, and none of those measurements is recent or large.

The rules, plainly

What is actually expected of a Mormon woman — and what isn’t.

Search engines ask this bluntly — “rules for Mormon women,” “Mormon women head covering,” “can Mormon women vote” — so here is the plain record. The church’s standards of conduct apply to women and men alike: the Word of Wisdom (no alcohol, tobacco, coffee or tea), chastity outside marriage, Sabbath observance, tithing and modest dress. There are no women-only dress rules and no head coverings in daily life or in worship; inside temples, both men and women wear white. Women vote, work, hold office and earn degrees without any church restriction. Congregations are not sex-segregated; men and women sit together in worship, and only the Sunday second-hour classes meet by organization. The single structural difference is ordination: women are not ordained to the priesthood, so they do not serve as bishops, elders or apostles. Documented

On doctrine: the church teaches that women and men are equal before God and that both are necessary for exaltation; it affirms belief in a Heavenly Mother alongside Heavenly Father; it honors Eve as a wise and necessary agent rather than the author of a fall; and since 1995 it has described husbands and wives as equal partners. The Book of Mormon itself names only a handful of women — Sariah, Abish and Isabel among them — and Latter-day Saint teaching about women draws far more on later revelation and on the Relief Society than on that text. Documented

Two subjects belong to other pages on this site. Reality television’s version of Mormon women is examined, scene by scene, in our “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” fact-check, and the portrayal of sister missionaries in the film Heretic on our Heretic page. Allegations of abuse involving the church are reported in our abuse coverage, where survivor testimony is treated on its own terms and the outcomes data on this page is never used as a counterweight.

Frequently asked questions

Women in the Mormon Church: straight answers.