A brief description of:

Clergy Women:  An Uphill Calling

By Barbara Brown Zikmund, Adair T. Lummis, and Patricia Mei Yin Chang  

The largest study ever of clergy women in America! 

Perhaps the most significant event in twentieth-century American Protestant churches has been the entry of tens of thousands of women into the church's ordained ministry.  How are these women's experiences as ministers different from their male counterparts?  What are their callings and careers like?  What are their prospects for employment, income, and satisfaction? Based on nearly five thousand surveys among sixteen Protestant denominations, plus hundreds of in-depth personal interviews, this book offers the most authoritative information ever about the real experiences of clergy women (and men), along with anecdote that show what the life American clergy today is really like.

In Protestant denominations today, women account for about 10 percent of the clergy.  Women clergy have greater difficulty in finding employment, they are more likely to be part-time, and even when their experience and qualifications match those of male clergy in the same denomination and in the same positions, they still average 9 percent less in salary.  Clergy women are likely to experience very different career paths than clergy men, and this book documents the options available to and the decision made by women and men through their first three ministerial jobs.  This analysis provides the clearest focus available for understanding how ministers experience their jobs and careers.

Despite difficulties and continuing discrimination, clergy women are creating new paths for themselves and for others.  With a strong sense of calling, women in ministry are expanding the definitions of ministry and finding new and exciting ways to response faithfully to their call.  Clergy Women looks ahead to the new forms of ministry now taking shape.

Barbara Brown Zikmund is President of Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut.

Adair T. Lummis is Faculty Associate at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, CT.

Patricia Mei Yin Chang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.

ISBN 0-664-25673-2