Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Pulpit Payroll: A Battle of the Sexes
- Salary (8.6 percent)
- Housing (20.4 percent)
- Retirement (24.8 percent)
There's one not-so-minor—OK, glaring— "detail" that we should keep in mind in interpreting the data, however: Men accounted for more than 93 percent of those surveyed. I don't point that out to refute the study but to caution against taking the executive summary of the Your Church report and running with it. We've all been guilty of making sweeping generalizations based on surveys, studies and reports without ever reading the fine print.
Obviously, male pastors are more common in this country than female ones. That seems to be true not only at the senior pastor level, but others as well. Yet think about this poll from a purely statistical view: If the aggregate data reflects a 90/10 ratio between the two groups, won't the results inherently be skewed? In this case, the women's responses—simply because there were less of them—carried more weight in defining their demographic. Had there been a more balanced poll, we likely would see a different result. How different—I don't know.
That little personal objection aside, the survey still presents some interesting questions that I'd love to hear responses to.
YOUR TURN: If women in virtually every other field and across the globe earn (on average) less than men, why do you think the tables are turned when it comes to ministry? What are your views of how women pastors should be paid in comparison to men? Have you encountered this issue at your own church?
The data is comparing apples to apples so there is no problem or skew to the results.
Instead, it is a result of the newness of women in this position. For a woman to be hired as a pastor, it is likely that she is among the cream of the crop. So few women have broken this glass ceiling into the pastoral role, that those who have are in large churches, in large cities, with large budgets and the women are highly qualified. I suspect that as the number of female pastors increases, there will be more and more "average" women, with more "average" salaries and the gap will narrow. Alas, it will likely follow the way of other gender gaps in pay and a day will come when the female salaries average out lower than the men.
But I know that I have been paid more than my counterparts in some other denominations and some of these do not ordain women.
I wonder how these statistics would change if you only poled people from denominations that ordain women?
In that case, I would expect they are paid more because pastors on staff at large churches have higher salaries on average.
I attend a church of around 1300-1400 people, and our staff is very well-paid. I am from a denomination whose average church-size is 250-350. We are one of the top 10 churches in the U.S. in our denomination.
We have a newly-hired youth assistant with only volunteer experience and who has not yet completed a bachelor's degree. Her salary is the same as mine. I am at the director level of a small privately-owned business and have a master's degree in my field of discipline.
Mr. Mark S. Bias
Links to this post:
<< Home







