"SECULARISM WON’T SAVE US FROM SEXISM: ATHEISTS IN ROMANTIC DYADS DEMONSTRATE NON-EGALITARIAN CHORE DIVISION"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction:Major religions often have scriptures or teachings emphasizing the role of women in performing labour within the home.In contrast, secularism is often argued as promoting egalitarianism in relationships, which should produce less pronounced gender roles.If secularism promotes egalitarianism at an individual level, we would expect atheists in heterosexual, romantic dyads to report greater equality in the performance of unpaid labour.Purpose: Our intent was to explore how atheists divided household labour relative to Roman Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Baptists, Christians, Lutherans, Gospel/Pentecostals, Free Church/Presbyterians, United Church, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Agnostics, and the generically nonreligious.Method: The present study used data from the 2017 Canadian General Social Survey (Nweighted > 14,000,000) to investigate if there was a relationship between atheism and chore division.We retained only individuals who were in a romantic, heterosexual relationship in which they lived with their partner.Our housework variables were: meal preparation, laundry, generic housework, and washing dishes.Respondents could indicate that the chore was performed 'By themself', 'By their partner', or 'Split evenly'.Notably, we controlled for age, marital status, education of respondent, education of partner, employment status of respondent, employment status of partner, and whether children were in the home.Results: We found that the main effects of religious affiliation, religious attendance, prayer, and religiosity had little predictive power.Functionally, religious variables (unadjusted for sex) were not associated with more or less egalitarianism.When sex was added to the model, we found that women were more likely to prepare meals (RRR = 0.21, p < .001),wash laundry (RRR = 0.13, p < .001),perform generic housework (RRR = 0.19, p < .001),and wash the dishes (RRR = 0.47, p < .001).When examining our central research question-whether the relationship between sex and chore performance varied across religious affiliations-we found little evidence to support secularism promoting egalitarianism.Sexism was found to exist within romantic dyads irrespective of religious affiliation, and the burden of chores fell disproportionately on women.Discussion: While sexism is often portrayed as a latent or manifest product of religion, there is little evidence that secular groups (e.g., atheists) demonstrate a greater degree of egalitarianism with respect to the division of unpaid labour in the home.This may suggest that the uneven division of household labour is due to a broader structural sexism as opposed to a narrower religious sexism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".