If you’ve read about Christianity’s apparent revival, you have likely come across its familiar protagonist: the young male convert, often cast as the poster boy for Gen Z’s crisis of meaning, or else a fervent culture warrior dreaming of a restored Christendom. But amid the slew of opinion pieces attempting to explain why he and his friends are supposedly filling out pews, a central question remains unanswered: Where are the women?
A recent Gallup poll suggests that women, long the more religious sex, are losing interest in faith. Between 2024 and 2025, 42 percent of American men aged eighteen to twenty-nine said religion was “very important” in their lives, up fourteen percentage points in just two years. At 29 percent, their female counterparts sat considerably lower. Polling also suggests young women now leave religious communities at higher rates than young men, in a reversal of a longstanding pattern.
My Catholic church in Northwest London is full of faithful grandmas, mothers, and little girls darting in and out of the side chapels during Mass. But the young adult presence at the parish undoubtedly skews male. While some dioceses have reported conversion stats to the contrary in recent years, with Gen Z women leading the charge, I seldom meet Catholic women my age who weren’t raised in the faith. Certainly, I haven’t seen their experiences debated in the news to the extent that my newly Christian male friends’ had been. Thus, the hunt for the elusive female convert began.