The Stained Glass Ceiling: Career Attainment for Women Clergy

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2000 by Paul Sullins

Paul Sullins [*]

Despite formal acceptance, women clergy have faced subordination in practice in many Protestant denominations. Previous theory has Located this disparity in a distinction between the bureaucratic or "tightly coupled" elements of denominational organization and those that are cultural or "loosely coupled," predicting that, as the innovation of ordained women becomes routinized over time, gender disparities among the clergy will diminish.

To examine this thesis, priests in the Episcopal church in 1999 (n = 15,056) are examined for career gender inequality in status of position. Status is measured by independent rankings of the prestige of 15 position titles by experts and randomly selected clergy (n = 22) producing a highly reliable scale (inter-respondent alpha is .99). 1 find that: women clergy are over-represented in subordinate positions and those having lower status; this inequality is remarkably constant and undiminished over time and throughout the clergy career; and occurs only in congregational, not administrative, positions. All three findings are confirmed in a smaller sample of clergy in another female-ordaining denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

These findings confirm yet also suggest limitations to the predictions using organizational theory. I argue that, in addition to organizational dynamics, the analogy of family relationships may also be fruitful for understanding gender in modern religious denominations.

Calls for admitting women to the ranks of ordained ministry have long been a controversial feature of American church life, but it is only since the 1970s that women have entered ordained ministry in appreciable numbers. Both the numbers of denominations sanctioning women's ordination, and the numbers of women actually entering the ministry, have increased dramatically since 1970 (Chaves 1993). Among the professions, the clerical ministry was one of the first to encounter proposals to admit women and one of the last to actually do so; and the acceptance of women clergy is far from universal or uncontested even today. Nonetheless, for many denominations two decades have now passed since ordaining women in significant numbers, providing a chance to take stock, as the innovation of female clergy becomes regularized, and to take count, as the number of women priests becomes sufficient to measure impressions and ideals against empirical data. Accordingly, a growing number of research studies have begun to examine women's ordination and ordained women to provide purchase on issues about church organization (Chaves 1996) and culture (Chaves 1997; Schmidt 1996), clergy roles (Wallace 1992), and women in the professions more generally (Lehman 1993; Nesbitt 1997).

The Episcopal church has featured prominently in such studies (Morgan 1985; Nesbitt 1993, 1997; Prelinger 1992a; Schmidt 1996), since in a number of ways it is paradigmatic of the larger ecology of church organizations regarding women clergy. The Episcopal church, like other Protestant mainline churches, began ordaining women in the mid-70s [1] after a decade of struggle. The symbolic and organizational position of priests in the Episcopal church partakes of elements of both Protestant ism and Catholicism. While ordaining women is permitted under church law and is widely accepted in fact, the church's constitution does not require it, and formal opposition to it is tolerated. Finally, the polity of the Episcopal church contains dynamics that are at the same time both congregational and hierarchical.

Recent research has focused on the disparity between formal acceptance and the actual status of women priests in those denominations that have begun ordaining women. Formal and symbolic elements in denominations may support and advance equal status for women clergy, yet as Chaves observes "denominational policy often fails to correspond to the actual practice of women in ministry" (1997: 1). As frequently noted (Lehman 1993; Nesbitt 1993; Schmidt 1996), the more responsible, prestigious, and superordinate church positions in virtually every female-ordaining denomination fall disproportionately to men. Or as more than one woman priest has said, "Ordination is one thing, deployment is another" (quoted in Schmidt 1996: 26).

As the Protestant mainline enters, as it were, the second generation of women clergy, a close examination of the character and trends of gender disparity is both timely and pertinent. Is the lower job attainment of women a product of the newness of women's entry into a formerly all-male domain, or does it reflect more persistent structural disparity regarding women? Is it diminishing, or continuing in full force? Is it uniform, or only located in certain sectors of church life or structure? These questions underlie a pointed and practical concern: Are those women being ordained priests today likely to be better off than the pioneer ordinands of 20 years ago? These concerns form the central questions of this study.