There are a few themes that I constantly return to here, one of which is gender & sex. No one interacts with the world other than as a male or as a female. We are embodied creatures and everything we see, think and feel comes through bodies that are different, that shape our interactions, experiences, reflections and responses. We can’t help it.

And in the last 50 years or so there has been an almighty shift across the world. Women are rising, men are flailing and failing. Singles are rising, coupling and marriage are declining, fertility is crashing globally, political views are diverging wildly and in country after country these trends will have significant ramifications for society. And of course for the church. So this has less to do with the old inter-church arguments about women’s leadership (although some of that) but the absolute turmoil in society as assumptions that have held for thousands of years are being swept away.

The observant among you will notice that there is one source that gets repeated mentions and that’s because Alice Evans is an expert in investigating it and interestingly, not afraid to revisit her assumptions and change them according to the data. And here comes the necessary caveat – I’m not endorsing all her conclusions or interpretations but if we want to engage with topics then we must engage with the leading researchers and current voices on a topic and right now one of those is Alice.

The Struggling Male

• Automation, Ageing & Men’s Loss of Status TLDR: “Compared to previous generations, young men are now less likely to enjoy hierarchical status and seniority over women. This levelling holds for both the least and the most educated men.”
• Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity TLDR: “Young women are increasingly joining progressive universities, earning on par with male peers, and feeling free to pursue hedonistic pleasure…Men are losing their patriarchal privileges, and it’s leaving a nasty aftertaste.”
• The stunning decline of the preference for having boys. TLDR: “The new girl preference also reflects increasing worries about boys’ prospects.”
• Beyond Brawn: Reimagining Masculinity. TLDR: “Today, the straitjacket of masculinity creates a coordination problem where men hesitate to enter care and teaching, fearing loss of status. Yet – as our population ages – economic opportunities in care work are rapidly expanding. Cultural rigidities prevent men from seizing new jobs.”

The Growing Gender Divide

• Can Men and Women Be Friends? Evidence from 1.3 Trillion Facebook Connections TLDR: “Global analysis reveals that cross-gender friendships remain rare in societies where male honour depends on female seclusion. This culture predicts both low female labor force participation and more patriarchal beliefs.”
• Fraternising with the enemy. TLDR: “Young men have lurched to the Right. We have been told this again and again. What we hear less often is that young women have lurched to the Left.”

Challenges for women

• The Danger of Women’s Weakness. TLDR: “When equality feels premised on interchangeability, asking for a major social asymmetry means compromising your claim to equality.”
• The Contradiction That Rules Feminism. TLDR: “Are women strong and independent or weak and vulnerable? Feminists can’t decide.”
• Why we need to talk about periods, breasts and injuries in women’s sport. TLDR: “”We were literally treated as mini-men” – see articles above. They wanted that, then they got that and then found out it didn’t work.
• Should the goal size be smaller in women’s football? I think yes.

Christians and the gender debates

• Why is God male? TLDR: “That’s the biggest reason our male and femaleness matters, and that our bodies tell us what our male and femaleness is, because reality is a story. We were made so that redemption is hard-coded into everything you’ve ever seen, the gospel is the operating principle of the cosmos.”
• Stop domesticating women. TLDR: “No woman wants a man whose life vision is to bring her under his control to serve his purposes. Yet it happens more than we would like to admit. To be honest, the vision given to so many Christian men is that of finding a good woman and domesticating her. Taking away the wildness and the passion and sense of adventure and replacing it with compliance and control. We get busy and low on energy, so we try and reduce the vision of women to what we have the capacity to manage.”
• Same Text, Opposing Conclusions. TLDR: “Two readers, two teachers, one text, two opposite usages of it. Heaven help us. Can it, one wonders? I truly hope so”
• Gender Differences: Generalisations Are not Stereotypes. TLDR: “As Christian men and women, filled with God’s Spirit and called to loving unity in the body of Christ, we can be open to our natural differences (in their varied individual manifestations and cultural expressions) and work with them for the glory of God.”
• The Future of Difference: Evangelicals and Gender Essentialism. TLDR: “The gender differences of men and women in God’s created order are not only grounded in their differently sexed bodies but reflect the differentiated unity and equality of the divine persons. I have also argued that the biblical commands avoid common and culturally contrived essentialist fallacies. Fully leveraging this holistic vision of difference will be key for engaging the “culture of confusion” and the “battle for the body” we see around us every day.”
• Did aristocratic women drive the rise of Christianity? TLDR: “Michele Salzman challenges the prevailing consensus that women played a significant role as active converters during the early spread of Christianity. Her biographical data finds little support for the widespread notion of women converting their husbands. Notably, there’s scant evidence of intermarriages between Christians and pagans that could facilitate such secondary conversions: both pagans and Christians discouraged marriage between people of a different faith. And when intermarriage did occur, husbands in this dataset didn’t adopt their wives’ faith. Is it possible that women turned to Christianity in larger numbers before marriage? The data does not support this either: most children followed the religion of their parents; If anything, boys were slightly more inclined to convert than girls.”
• The Christian Challenge to Reactionary Feminism. TLDR: “There is the challenge to reactionary feminists from the concept of divine grace. Natural reason, as I’ve said, is important for Christian ethics; but it is by no means the whole story. The natural law foundation to Christian ethics works its way up to a summit, and that summit is grace.”

Miscellaneous on gender

• Does Egalitarianism enable more Gender Equality? TLDR: “In societies where no one is special, men seem much more accepting of female leadership.”
• Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World? And Part 2. TLDR: “If the secrets to Scandinavia’s success are an absence of modesty, coordinated bargaining, and wage compression, the big question is how to preserve these socio-economic institutions amid a slowdown in labour productivity and demographic change. For all this talk of utopia, Sweden has failed to support migrant women’s integration and economic activity.”