When I was a young, conservative, fully participating young woman in the LDS Church, I recognized problems and disparities in the youth programs. I remember one particular leadership council meeting where I brought up how the Bishop regularly bought pizza for the young men. I questioned why the same wasn’t done for the young women. The group patiently explained to me that the Bishop presided over the young men and his buying them pizza was simply the way things were done. No need to get worked up about it or make a scene.
I, of course, wasn’t really bringing up just pizza that day. The Bishop, the most influential person in our ward, was regularly meeting and socializing with the young men. While our budgets were tightly managed, he casually purchased them pizza from his own pocket regularly because he was one of the guys. This was just one example of the my age-old frustration over young men casually meeting to have fun and hang out, while young women were constantly striving to learn and better themselves at each activity, with a spiritual purpose at the core.
The reality for young men is that they are born with purpose, they wake up with purpose, and they arrive with purpose. Simply being male makes them important and instantly allows them a special place at church. They hold the priesthood and their continued activity in the church is absolutely necessary for its survival. They are so important, the members of the Bishopric are part of their quorums and often appear to be “one of the guys” in the young men’s program, enjoying a special closeness and friendship young women (and any woman for that matter) will rarely enjoy with the leaders of the ward.
Men may like to tell women that they are more naturally spiritual to excuse focusing so much energy on boys, young men, and other men. It’s interesting, though, how their spiritual development seems so dependent on socializing, participating in physical activities, and having fun. I believe the truth is that being male in a patriarchal church already has so many spiritual and personal advantages, the underlying goal is truly retention.
And the rub? These advantages come at a cost for girls and women. If you are a 15 year-old girl and the Bishopric is embedded in the Young Men’s program, you learn from an early age how important boys are, their value in the ward, and their standing with leaders. When you meet together with leaders, they’ve established a relationship built through Sunday meetings and activities that excluded you. This is certain to impact your comfort level within and influence with the group.
Do I think this is intentional or deliberate? Absolutely not. But sometimes that makes it worse. It’s exhausting and painful to watch this cycle continue in 2024 without good men being bothered by it. I’ve heard suggestions that a female leader similar to the Bishop lead the Young Women’s Program – but who would that be?
And, honestly, as the LDS church becomes my central place of faith less and less, I feel a guilt sometimes for speaking up about these things. It seems like I’m trying to steal something precious from my own husband or sons. Plus, plenty of women and girls say they are happy and thriving.
But I also recognize that these constant, seemingly innocent decisions we let slide in patriarchy add up together to have lasting, harmful consequences. The bishopric spending so much time and energy exclusively with the young men sends a myriad of messages every Sunday. It emphasizes to young men how they are the priority and how important they are for the ward and the church. It subtly and not so subtly emphasizes how young women have a supporting role. It underlines the boys club of church leadership and how relationships of power are built.
Yet, it is not the YM before their missions who are leaving. The YM are SO important, then they go on missions and come back and get thrown into elders quorum where they are no longer shining stars who get pizza and pampered, and funny, that is when most of them leave.
Maybe, the church should start giving a crap about all the adults. And of course it is worse for the YW, who were never important to begin with and then they graduate from YW, and start feeling the “you’re nothing if you are not married” and so they get married, only to find out that they have fulfilled their only purpose for existing and might as well fade into nothingness and the church wouldn’t even notice.
I think the church has been focusing on the young men, and instead of seeing that as a mistake, has just doubled down on the boys because the adult men are not staying. Meanwhile, the quality of everything from spirituality of Sacrament meeting to fun social interaction at activities for adults has dropped into the cold freezing mud and they wonder why adults are not staying active long enough to raise families.
For years they have known that women frequently stay active when their husband drops out, and that many men stay active because the wife wants him to, and it is the women who get the children to church. Children follow the religion of their mother over 75% of the time statistically. And if a woman leaves the church, the whole family follows. But who does the church spend all the retention efforts on? Not the one person in the family that everyone follows out when she leaves. Nope, let’s pamper the boys.
Pampering doesn’t make them strong. Quite the opposite. Why do the male idiots at the top think women stay more than men? How about because the lack of pampering makes them stronger. The boys play basketball and the girls do a spiritual activity. The boys are growing up to expect fun and games and then find out the church isn’t all basketball and pizza. And the leaders can’t figure out why the men leave. Because they grow into a bunch of spoiled pampered immature men.
Just ask the YW who try to date them and find nonmember men treat them better. Or ask the sister missionaries put “under” the elders. Our men have trouble in the real world if they get a female boss, or a boss who doesn’t treat them like their bishop did, because our bishops are not acting like strict authority figures, but trying to be buddies. Parenting experts will tell you this being buddies with children is not good for them. Children should be buddies with peers, not the authority figures in their lives. From a psychological standpoint this is damaging.
I hated this stem as a child when I first felt like God only loved boys, I hated it as an abuse victim when my abuser was more loved than I was, and I hate it as a cranky old lady.
Oh my goodness, yes! I grew up as a child of adult converts with no brothers, so I didn’t have any male relatives to compare my church experience to. When my husband was called as our ward young men’s president I was absolutely floored to learn the the priest’s quorum met in the bishop’s office every single week for class with the bishop. My personal experience had been just one big, super important Sunday where the bishop came and met with the Laurels class, and what a big deal had been made over that week – and the boys were literally meeting with the guy every single other week?! I’d had no idea.
How different would it have been meeting with the bishop if you already knew each other on such a personal level, not to mention being the same gender? What kind of leadership mentoring did the boys get spending all that time with the head of their ward? I literally cannot fathom what it would be like to have been a Mormon boy. (Honestly, I think I would’ve loved it and thought it was all so cool. Go on missions? Give blessings? Preside and be important?! I probably wouldn’t have seen the disparity as a teenager either if I was a boy.)
I’m a late Boomer who comes from a long line of strong women on my dad’s side and who embraced feminism thanks to the example of these women and especially thanks to my dad’s mom I turned 12 and was able to go to YW. It upset me to no end to see the YM playing basketball or volleyball in the gym or going on some fun adventure while we YW were getting yet another lesson on getting married young and in the temple and having huge bunch of kids ASAP while faithfully supporting our Priesthood holding husbands. It also never made sense that the scout camp and overnighter fees were paid for by the ward while we girls had to earn the money through bake sales, car washes and more. It was so wrong!
I point blank asked my bishop why there was such a disparity between the ways that YW and YM were treated. This man was the father of 6 daughters and had never given a thought to this inequality before. After a couple of months of watching and participating in both YW and YM activities he called all of us teens into the chapel one week and announced that we’d be doing things differently on activity evenings so that the girls had more enjoyable activities that we planned ourselves and that the guys would learn basic life skills and gospel principles that would help them be better prepared for adulthood and missionary service. Our bishop was willing to do away with the correlated curriculum which was bad back then but definitely not as bad as it is now.
It wasn’t until I graduated from college and was called to work with the YW that I noticed that the treatment of the YW had changed for the worse between my time as a teenaged girl until then. How thoroughly disheartening! The lessons were trite, derivative and skewed heavily towards teaching the girls to always defer to the boys and male leaders regardless of whether or not they deserved it. I refused to give those lessons. Of course the girls noticed the disparity in treatment between them and the guys. As the bishop in this ward was unenlightened regarding the treatment of girls and women in the church our YW presidency did everything we could to showcase the YW in the ward and to focus our lessons on coming to truly know and love the Savior and teaching them important life skills. Things have only gone downhill from that time.
All of my nieces except 2 on my side of the family and 2 on my husband’s side are inactive or have completely left the church. These nieces who’ve left uniformly agree that they left because the church treated them as much less valuable than the young men and because they didn’t want to get married right out of or relatively shortly after HS and immediately begin having babies nor did they want to date and marry Mormon men who expected these women obey them implicitly “because they were the Priesthood” and automatically expected female members to defer to them in all things-even if they were uneducated, uncouth, close minded, and misogynistic.
The aged men who make up the Q15 are stuck back in the pre-Second Wave Feminism era. As a result their attitudes about girls and women have NOT evolved from the 1950’s while the rest of the world has moved on. Their backwards and harmful attitudes and teachings towards and about girls and women means that the church is hemorrhaging the very people who could make the best contributions to the church. I wonder if and when they will finally wake up to the reality that the church is now but a shell of its former self because of their intransigence.
Amen to the writer and to all of you who’ve commented.
“ Do I think this is intentional or deliberate? Absolutely not. But sometimes that makes it worse. It’s exhausting and painful to watch this cycle continue in 2024 without good men being bothered by it.”
This is it. If this were 1950, it might be understandable. But it’s discouraging that so many members are still entirely comfortable with the disparity. This is how today’s adult men grew up, and it worked for them, so why would they change anything?
For years, I advocated for equal representation of women and men on Ward Councils, and one of the ironic ways they improved the ratio was by eliminating the Young Men presidency in favor of the Bishopric directly administering the YM program. This is not what I asked for. Now, even more than when I was a Youth, the bishopric is set up to favor boys over girls.
This article and the above comments NAILED it. The bishoprics being over the young men’s program has caused SO many problems. The young men ALWAYS get priority, and the rest of the church suffers.
The church coddles the boys from the moment they’re born until they return home from their missions. They spend the first 18-19 years of their lives getting extra attention and special treatment at church. Then, they spend the next 2 years on their missions being treated like kings and lauded simply for wearing a name badge. These former boys – now men – get major whiplash and a rude awakening upon coming home and realizing they’re no longer being catered to and have aged out of the church’s special interest group.
Meanwhile, the girls – who eventually become women – are held to impossible standards and have endless restrictions placed on their activities and special events. The boys get to have fun and go and do whatever they want when they want. Yet, the girls can’t get the bishopric to pay attention to them for five minutes. Sister missionaries are demonized and scorned for doing the same amount of work (sometimes more) than the elders and are often treated like pariahs whose contributions don’t matter.
This leads to a disillusioned adult church populace of men and women who feel adrift, bored, and ignored by their church leaders. Sunday school lessons, stake/ward activities, and parties focus on the Primary kids, young men, and young women 90% of the time, with the boys getting the majority, if not all, of that attention. Then, church leaders wonder why the adult members are less than enthused about attending and helping out and often feel like they’ve been put out to pasture.
These feelings intensify as the elderly population is neglected during their end-of-life years – which is a highly vulnerable time for these men and women. It’s heartbreaking when they talk about all the years of sacrifice and service they gave to their fellow man, only for it to feel like it doesn’t matter – like they don’t matter – because the bishopric can’t be bothered to check on them.
I’ve seen a similar phenomenon in student and YSA wards. The bishoprics prioritize the Elder’s Quorum over the Relief Society, and the cycle continues. Women are seen as old maids at 31 who are kicked to the curb and left to the whims of the family ward or a mid-singles ward (where the cycle continues), while single men over 40 are still considered YSAs and can stay for as long as they want. It leads to bishoprics giving single women endless lectures about how perfect they must be and how hard they must work to exceed the unrealistic expectations hoisted onto them while the men are enough just as they are.
In that case, you could say that student, YSA, and mid-singles wards are extensions of the young men’s/young women’s programs, which is not good.
Either way, the majority of the church body got thrown under the bus when the bishoprics were put in charge of the young men’s program.