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‘Why do women outnumber men 2:1 in our (caveat: White British) churches?’ is a valid question.

I just don’t think ‘the feminisation of the Church’ is a valid answer. Women outnumbered men in our churches 2:1 throughout the twentieth century—long before we ordained female priests in 1994, female bishops in 2015, or the first female Archbishop of Canterbury in 2026—and probably from longer ago than that.

The reasons women outnumber men 2:1 in our churches are many and complex, including the different impact of two World Wars on those who went off to war and those who waited for their return, changing patterns to work, and other social upheavals. But here are some thoughts I find compelling.

We are social animals. And, other than when we are looking for a mate to procreate with (and even then, we look to our own sex for safety and support) women tend to socialise with women, and men tend to socialise with men. (Clearly, this is a broad observation.) Because women outnumber men in our churches, and have done so for longer than any living memory, women can reasonably expect to meet and socialise with other women within the activities of the life of the Church, whereas men can reasonably expect not to meet other men there (this is why churches that want to engage with men often create spaces such as men’s breakfasts, or men’s curry nights). And so, the imbalance is, to a large degree, self-perpetuating.

More than this, men, at least in English culture and in other cultures too, have a psychological need for space where women aren’t. Not women-hating men; men. The staple trope of English comedy of the hen-pecked husband and the battle-axe wife certainly exaggerates for effect; but it is rooted in something real, evidenced by the solitude of the shed at the end of the garden, the comradeship of the Working Men’s Club, the discreet networking of the Masonic lodge, the suicide-prevention lifeline of Andy’s Man Club, the Boy’s Own adventure of long cycle rides. This is about having a safe space to retreat, to sustain, for the long haul, relationships with the women in our lives, our wives and daughters, our mothers and sisters, our female colleagues.

Such spaces are becoming fewer and further between, as gender equality has tended to demand equal access to the same spaces over equity of spaces. And the local church has never been such a space (though monasteries and convents have recognised their value). Indeed, the gender imbalance does make the local church a retreat for women from their men, an hour to themselves on a Sunday morning while their husband has the equivalent space left at home, or on the golf course. And this is, perhaps, all the more important, as the demands of work and home life have squeezed opportunities for many women to socialise elsewhere.

Interestingly, many other faiths gather such that the men and the women sit in different rooms or different sides of the same room. The Church does not; and there are both real gains to this, and, perhaps, a real loss.

But the ‘problem’ is not that the space, or what is done within the space, or even who presides over the space, is feminised. It is that there are women there at all, in almost every activity of the local church. Not because women are a problem, but because the lack of any space at all, within the life of the Church community, for Men Only is a problem. Again, and to be clear, not a problem for misogynists; a problem for a fundamental psychological need, that is being met for women to a far more effective extent than it is for men.

Of course, there are still men who are perfectly happy to share space with women in the Church—not least because they have access to some other men-only space. If there are two women to every man in the Church, then a third of us are men. And if we are told that men are so powerful that small boats of unarmed men amounts to an invasion, we can hardly claim with any consistency that being 33% of a community demographic is too few to have an impact.

But we do need to think long and hard about the imbalance, and what might be done about it.