When It Comes to Competition, Women Clergy Are No Angels

Women clergy are tougher colleagues than a lot of people suspected.

In a study of competition in the workplace, Hartford Seminary researchers found that nearly two-thirds of clergywomen said women of the cloth are competitive with one another.

Less than a third said clergywomen in their areas cooperate with each other without competing.

The findings strike down the image that clergywomen avoid competing out of respect for feminist ideals of sisterhood, but reflect a more professional approach to the workplace, said Adair Lummis, who reported the study results at a recent meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

“Women are saying: We are both supportive and competitive,” Lummis said. “To deny that competition exists in this marketplace is unrealistic.”

Women are still banned from pastoral positions in some religious groups, such as Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism. But various Protestant churches have permitted female clergy for more than a century, and women founded others, such as the Christian Science Church and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

Still, it was not until the 1970s that women, powered by the feminist and civil rights movements, began donning religious robes in large numbers, as they also forged into other previously off-limits territory such as the military.

Even today, Lummis said, there is the thinking--voiced by many feminist theologians--that “women should stick together and fight the good fight, and if you competed against one another, that would destroy that.”

But even if that was true a generation ago--when women were so underrepresented they needed to stick together for survival--it is no longer the case, she said.

In their 1993-94 mail survey of 4,600 clergy in 15 Protestant denominations, Lummis and the other researchers, Barbara Brown Zikmund and Patricia Chang, found both men and women clergy recognize that women ministers compete with one another. The survey did not examine competition among male clergy.

Among the 2,485 women clergy respondents, 55% said clergywomen in their denomination and region are both cooperative and competitive with one another; 31% said clergywomen were cooperative, but not competitive with one another; and only 10% said clergywomen were more competitive with one another than mutually supportive.

Four percent did not give answers that fit into one of the three categories researchers classified as “professionals,” “angels” and “competitors.”

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The 2,116 male clergy respondents perceived even greater competition among women clergy. Forty percent said the women were both cooperative and competitive, while 27% said women clergy were more competitive with one another than cooperative.

Twenty-two percent of male clergy said their female colleagues were cooperative, but not competitive with one another, while 11% would not put women clergy into any of the three categories.

The Rev. Alison Halsey of University Presbyterian Church in Buffalo, the first clergywoman in her denomination in western New York, said she thinks it is important for her to open doors for other women in a collegial, not a competitive, manner.

In the words of an old spiritual, she said, “If you get to heaven before I do, just drill a hole and pull me through.”

But the Rev. Barbara Blaisdell of Central Christian Church in Indianapolis said the survey results are not surprising.

“Clergywomen, I really don’t think, are any different in any essential way from clergymen in role and function,” she said. “Sin and temptation do not discriminate.”