Abstract
Objective: This paper seeks to understand the changing roles of religiosity and gender attitudes in the employment of women in Europe between 2004 and 2016.
 Background: Religiosity and gender traditionalism are both considered to decrease the likelihood of women’s employment. This study argues that this relationship needs to be decoupled, as religiosity and gender traditionalism have different underlying mechanisms.
 Method: We analysed rounds 2 (2004), 4 (2008), 8 (2010), and 10 (2016) of the European Social Survey (ESS), which include, among other data, information on employment, religious affiliation, religiosity, and gender role attitudes in 16 countries (N=39,233).
 Results: We show that taking religiosity into account further increases the already increased likelihood of employment for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women compared to women with no religion. We also find, however, that religiosity decreases the employment gap between Muslim and Orthodox women on the one hand and secular women on the other. Including gender role attitudes in the model only marginally explains the employment gap.
 Conclusion: Our findings support the idea that the mechanisms that underlie the relationships religiosity and traditional gender role attitudes have with women's employment differ. Over time, the likelihood of employment increases for women of all religions, except for Muslim women, among whom it drops.
Highlights
Compared to other regions of the world, Europe arguably has the highest levels of genderegalitarian views, the lowest levels of religious observance1, and the highest rates of women’s employment in the world, albeit with considerable variation between European countries (Bussemaker et al 2017; Guveli & Platt 2020; Pfau-Effinger 2017; Spierings 2018)
This study argues that this relationship needs to be decoupled, as religiosity and gender traditionalism have different underlying mechanisms
We argued that religiosity and traditional gender role attitudes may impede women’s likelihood of employment, and that these factors might explain the differences in the employment rates of women in different religious groups (Inglehart & Norris 2003)
Summary
Compared to other regions of the world, Europe arguably has the highest levels of genderegalitarian views, the lowest levels of religious observance (religiosity), and the highest rates of women’s employment in the world, albeit with considerable variation between European countries (Bussemaker et al 2017; Guveli & Platt 2020; Pfau-Effinger 2017; Spierings 2018). Koopmans (2016) concluded that religiosity and patriarchal gender attitudes fully explain the Muslim employment gap, while others have found that these factors only partly explain the differences (Khoudja & Fleischmann 2015), or that religiosity has no additional explanatory power (Khoudja & Platt 2018) Connecting these two literatures may help to shed light on the question of whether decreases in religiosity and patriarchal gender attitudes develop simultaneously with increases in labour market participation, and on the question of whether developments in women’s labour market participation rates can be explained by changes in religiosity and gender attitudes. We theorise that the role of religiosity and gender attitudes in shaping employment decisions might have changed This argument draws in particular from the literature on integration, Islam, and gender, which posits that in the context of secularised or European Islam, there has been a “decoupling” of gender and religion (Röder 2014; Spierings 2016; Van Klingeren & Spierings 2020). We asked the following question: How have religiosity and gender attitudes affected the likelihood of employment of women from different religious groups in Europe over time?
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