We went looking for a gender pay gap in ministry. We found something that matters more, and is easier to miss.
Start with the number you'd expect us to lead with. Among ministry leaders who draw a salary, average pay for women is . For men it's .
That is not a meaningful gap. Restrict it to full-time staff and it stays small — for women against for men. If you were expecting a story about women being underpaid for the same work, the salary data doesn't support it.
The disparity is upstream of salary. It's in who is on payroll at all.
of women in ministry are unpaid volunteers, against of men.
Base: everyone who answered the compensation question
And of men hold full-time ministry positions, compared with of women.
So the equal-salary finding comes with a caveat that swallows it: women who make it onto payroll are paid comparably. Far fewer of them get there.
The gap isn't in the paycheck. It's in who is offered one.
Ministry roles in this survey are strikingly gendered, and the roles women fill most are the ones least likely to come with a salary.
Bars show gender composition of each role. Pay is the estimated average among paid respondents; volunteer roles have no salary to report.
Kids ministry volunteer — the least compensated role in the survey, by definition — is women. Lead pastor, the role with the most institutional authority, is women.
That is the mechanism. Nobody has to pay women less for the same job to produce a large economic disparity. It's enough that the unpaid work and the paid work are different jobs, and that men and women are sorted into them at very different rates.
If you audited salaries for fairness, this church would pass. The inequality happened before anyone opened the payroll file. What an equal-pay audit would miss
Volunteering is often a choice. Many people serve unpaid gladly and would refuse a salary. This data cannot distinguish a volunteer who wants that role from one who wanted a job and wasn't offered one. That distinction matters enormously, and we didn't ask.
These are unadjusted figures. No controls for hours, tenure, church size, or role. Church size alone swings average pay by about , which is far more than any gender difference we found.
Averages come from bands. The survey asks for a pay range, so every dollar figure is an estimate built from band midpoints — good for comparison, not for payroll.
Not are we paying women fairly — the salary data suggests you probably are. The harder question is the one upstream:
Of the people doing this work in your church without pay, how many were ever asked if they wanted a job?
Based on responses, of which reported paid compensation. Averages use band midpoints ($100,000+ treated as $115,000) and include only paid respondents — men and women.
Unpaid volunteers are never averaged in as $0. Doing so would produce a dramatic-looking gender pay gap that is really a difference in who holds paid roles — the actual finding, stated plainly instead of disguised as a salary number.