Gender Role Orientation and Attitude toward Christianity: A Study among Older Men and Women in the United Kingdom

Abstract

A sample of 496 older men and women in England, mainly in their sixties and seventies, completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory together with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. The data demonstrated that psychological femininity is key to individual differences in religiosity (as assessed by attitude toward Christianity) within the sexes and that, after taking gender role orientation into account, biological sex conveyed no additional predictive power in respect of individual differences in religiosity (as assessed by attitude toward Christianity). This finding is explained in terms of Eysenck's biologically-based dimensional model of personality which construes psychological masculinity and femininity as one of the seven constituent components of one of the three major dimensions of personality (psychoticism). This psychologically-based theory renders redundant sociologically-based socialization theories designed to account for differences in religiosity between the sexes.