About the author:  Some are born heterodox, some achieve heterodoxy, some have heterodoxy thrust upon them. Christian N. K. Anderson comes by his interest in Mormon Studies honestly as the son of Paul L. Anderson (author of four LDS hymns, a curator at both the LDS Church History Museum and BYU Museum of Art, and past president of the Mormon History Association) and Lavina Fielding Anderson (editor of over 300 books about Mormonism, and one of the September 6 scholars who were excommunicated in 1993 when Christian was 13 years old). Despite everything, he also considers himself a child of God, though that is perhaps not a uniquely identifying characteristic. He holds a Master’s degree in marine biology and Ph.D. in theoretical physics. He lives in the ward where he was born, and has the church’s greatest calling: playing the piano in primary. 

In the four decades from 1984-2024, women have been allowed to preach in General Conference in contrast to all but a few exceptions in prior Church history. Has this resulted in genuine progress towards gender equity at the highest levels of power in the LDS hierarchy, or is this just an example of tokenizing in sensitive times? 

Speaking at all

Everyone knows that women speak less than men at General Conference, but have you ever seen just how much less graphically? The visuals are quite telling in a church that gives lip service to valuing women’s voices but doesn’t actually let them say very much! This devaluation has knock-on effects: women are unwilling to claim the authority of scripture and so citing fewer verses than men in what few talks they are allowed to give, sisters receiving far fewer mentions than men, and their talks are pillaged for ideas and catch phrases without proper attribution.

As little as women speak now, it has historically been much worse. After Lucy Mack Smith spoke in Oct. 1845 when the church was still headquartered in Nauvoo, it would be 84 years before the next woman would stand at the pulpit. Three times in 1929-30 the auxiliary presidents (Louise Robinson, Ruth May Fox, and May Anderson) were allowed to give brief testimonies, and non-member Ruth Pyrtle (National Education Association) also spoke in Apr ’30. This was followed by a 54 year hiatus, until Apr ’84 when outgoing auxiliary presidents Elaine Cannon and Barbara B Smith gave brief talks, as did their replacements Barbara W Winder and Ardeth G Kapp the next day. Starting four years later, from ’88-’93, one woman spoke per session, then two in most sessions until 2018, when the General Women’s Sessions were finally placed during General Conference weekend once a year, replacing the October Priesthood Session, until both were disbanded in 2023. The first women to offer prayers were Jean Stevens and Carole M. Stephens in Apr 2013.

There were, however, women’s meetings variously called “General Relief Society Conference”, “General Relief Society Meeting”, “General Women’s Meeting”, and “General Young Women Meeting”; these only began to be held on Saturday evenings during General Conference weekend in 2018. Even including the women’s meetings as part of General Conference (which they weren’t officially until 2014), the number of women speakers and number of words they shared was tiny compared to men, and has actually gone down since the late 1990s/early 2000s with the abolition of the women’s meetings.

The number of words women have said (or even used in footnotes) has also been a tiny fraction of that of men. At no point in LDS history, even including women’s conferences, have women ever uttered one word in 7.

Scripture Use

Quoting scripture is an implicit power move. Recognizing the power of a good exegesis goes all the way back to Jesus who “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” in Luke 24:27-45 and Paul, who we read in Acts 18:28 “mightily convinced the Jews, and that publickly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ.” Backing your point with a canonical verse says: “I read the scriptures, I understand the scriptures, and now I’m going to tell you what they mean. If you disagree, well you can just take it up with God.”

We therefore expect women at General Conference–in keeping with their subordinate role as non-priesthood holders and social conditioning to not appear too scholarly or strident– to quote scripture less often.

The first time women combined to cite more than 10 verses of scripture in a session was Oct 1980. While men broke the 1,000 verse barrier in Oct ’93, women didn’t even reach 100 until Apr ’06.  

With the advent of digital scriptures, verse citations have been steadily climbing and (as noted above) men speak far more often and (based on rank) longer than women, so average verses per talk may be a more useful metric. Women have only begun to consistently use scriptures more than men in just the last five years. In Apr ’89, the session’s only woman speaker Joy F. Evans used 37 verses, making the women’s “average” higher than the men’s but only because you were dividing the total by one speaker. With this one exception, in the 82 sessions spanning five decades from 1974 to 2014, the number of verses cited per talk drifted in a fairly straight line from 15 to 25 for men, and from 0 to 10 for women, preserving a 15 verse/talk spread between the sexes. Then Reyna Aburto burst on the scene and everything changed.

At the end of 2017, the most verses ever cited by a woman was 60 by Barbara Thompson in 2009, ranked behind-or-tied with 184 male talks. (Since 9.7% of speakers were women, one would expect the top woman to be in 9th or 10th place; a woman not being in the top 16 would be enough to conclude systematic bias was at work with 95% confidence). Then in Apr ’18 Sister Aburto gave a talk with 147 scripture verses, following this up with three more talks of over 100 verses between 2019 to 2022. In Oct ’23, Emily Belle Freeman put 206 verses into her short talk, pulling the women’s average over 100 for the session; men also set their record for most average verses per talk that session, but at a mere 45.

Does the choice of scripture cited reflect a bit more balance? I’m afraid not. I would like to refer everyone to Eliza Well’s excellent article “Quoted at the Pulpit” in Dialogue, Winter 2021. She looked at a sample of 9,200 quotations in General Conference and broke them into several categories (table 2). She divided scriptural quotations into those that were cited without naming an author in the text, those attributed to Jesus, another man (e.g. “Nephi wrote that…”), and those attributed to a woman. She found a total of 18 verses containing the words of women out of the 6,937 verses analyzed; 99.8% of the time when a speaker quoted words from the Standard Works, they were not women’s words.

Scriptures, of course, skew very male; in the Bible only 93 women speak and only 49 of them have names (Freeman, Lindsay Hardin (2014). Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter (3rd ed.). Forward Movement. ISBN 978-0880283915.) What about quotations from non-scriptural sources? Here women fare marginally better, with 175 quotes out of 2,245; this still means women are quoted just once for every 11.8 male quote. Worse, almost all of the quotes are from women outside the church or without a general board calling. Of the 1,122 quotes sampled from church leaders, 1,104 of them were from male church leaders. 

Mentioning Women vs Prophets

My own analysis of prophetic salience vs women paints an equally bleak picture. Note how many times the sitting prophet is mentioned, compared to how many times ALL WOMEN COMBINED are mentioned by name (excluding references to the couple, as in “We met with President and Sister Nelson, and he taught…”).

This ignoring of women’s input is perhaps most egregious in the hepeating of the phrase “covenant path[way]”. (Hepeating is the phenomenon where a woman in a group makes a point which is ignored, but a man later makes the same point and is praised and credited with the idea). Problematic as “Covenant Path” is, it unquestionably came from a woman. It had not occurred at all in the General Conference corpus back to the 1850s until Apr 2007 in Elaine S. Dalton’s talk “Stay on the Path”. It didn’t immediately catch on, appearing in just four talks over the next fourteen sessions (two of them also by women). But then in 2015, Russell M. Nelson used the phrase in “A Plea to My Sisters”, and again in 2017, and suddenly everyone was using the phrase. In 2018, Renlund, Oaks, Cook, Gong, and Dean M. Davies all used the phrase AND attributed it to Nelson (in the case of Oaks three times, all attributing it to Nelson in the text of his talk rather than just a footnote).

What we talk about when we talk about God

If prophets are mentioned more than sisters, then what about God? We nominally believe They consist of a Father and Mother, but who gets discussed more? Of course, Heavenly Father is mentioned more frequently, but again seeing just *how much more* frequently in a graphic tells a powerful story. Note that 10 of the 22 references to Heavenly Mother occur in just two talks (6 in Hinckley, Oct ‘91 and 4 in Renlund Apr ‘22), both of which ask people to discuss Her less (apparently 12 times in 102 sessions is alarmingly too much) and forbid praying to Her. This gag-order has been somewhat circumvented by 120 continued and slightly increasing references to “heavenly parents”, though LDS style guides since 2010 ask that this phrase not be capitalized. This is particularly galling, since it is preceded by a list of nearly 100 titles for God or Jesus that require capitalization, but as soon as a female deity is included in the godhead the capital is no longer needed. By contrast to the slight increase in “heavenly parents”, mentions of “Heavenly Father” have increased by about 2.1 per year from about 60 in the mid-1970s to about 165 in the mid-2020s. If current trends continue, it will take until 2035 for “heavenly parents” to have been mentioned in all General Conferences combined more often than the 209 times Heavenly Father was mentioned in just 2024 alone. 

It is difficult to quantify exactly what the effect of telling women the purpose of their existence is to become like God, then denying them their gender in the image of this ultimate goal. However, it seems hard to think this gendered discussion doesn’t support the patriarchal structure: “If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 19) 

Takeaways

1. With just a few exceptions, women did not get to speak at all in General Conference until the 1980s. They still say <1/7th of the words in Conference.
2. Even in their own Women’s Meetings, women invoked the authority of scripture far less than men until the last seven years.
3. Women are discussed by name far less often than even just one man. In the case of the popular phrase “covenant path”, it didn’t catch on until he-peated by a prophet who then got credit for the phrase.
4. Though we pay lip-service to the idea of a Heavenly Mother, our Heavenly Father is mentioned more often by a 5,700 : 22 ratio in the talks available on the LDS Church website.

Women have had a voice in General Conference since 1984. However, the above evidence suggests women collectively speak in a stage whisper, meant to reassure the audience they agree with what the men are saying, who are exclusively the real characters in the unfolding drama of the restoration. Like stage-whispered asides, they are heard by the audience, but are inaudible to the actors, who–for the most part–carry on as if nothing has been said at all. It took about 30 years for women to begin preaching with the same scriptural intensity as men; it remains to be seen if it will take another 30 before their messages start influencing rhetoric and policy. So far, they have not.