Young women are leaving Mormonism at a rate the church cannot dismiss as ordinary generational drift. A 2025 report placed retention among 18-year-old women raised Latter-day Saint just below 40 percent, compared with nearly 60 percent among men the same age. A separate national study found that 49 percent of women ages 18 to 49 who were raised in the church still identified with it, compared with 66 percent of women 50 and older.[1][3]
The headline figures establish the problem, but they do not explain it. The first survey used an online, opt-in panel, and its single-age estimates deserve caution.[2] Neither study followed every woman who left or asked her to name one controlling reason. The evidence supports a gendered retention problem, not a simple verdict about its cause.
The better question is what young women encounter when they compare the church's claims of female value with the institution they actually inhabit. Three pressures stand out: a patriarchal system that reserves final authority for men, a purity culture that has treated girls' bodies as spiritual risks, and a political posture increasingly distant from the views and lives of younger women. These pressures overlap. Together, they can turn belonging into a demand for submission.
The church often answers criticism of women's status by pointing to participation. Women lead the Relief Society and Young Women organizations. They teach, speak in sacrament meeting, serve missions, organize aid, and counsel with male leaders. The church's own explanation says women may hold leadership responsibilities beginning at age 12. It also says they cannot serve in offices that require priesthood keys, including bishop, apostle, and prophet.[10]
That boundary matters because priesthood keys are where consultation ends and binding authority begins. The General Handbook says priesthood is conferred on worthy male members. Women may exercise delegated authority when they are set apart for a calling, but that authority is temporary and remains under the direction of those who preside.[11] A woman may be trusted with work, influence, and spiritual labor. She cannot become the person from whom the institution says the governing authority flows.
At the local level, the arrangement is especially clear. The bishop is the ward's presiding high priest, common judge, primary spiritual leader, and holder of the keys to lead the congregation. He oversees ward finances and bears responsibility for the Relief Society and Young Women organizations.[12] A Relief Society president may understand women's needs better than anyone else in the room, but she still serves inside a chain of authority that ends with a man.
This is why visibility cannot settle the question. A woman can speak, organize, persuade, and advise. A male priesthood leader can approve budgets, issue callings and releases, conduct worthiness interviews, and make the final decision. Those roles are not equal simply because both are described as service. One is participation within the system. The other governs the system.
The same hierarchy reaches into the church's ideal of family life. The Family Proclamation says fathers are to preside and provide, while mothers are primarily responsible for nurture. It then calls husbands and wives equal partners.[13] Many believing couples interpret that language generously and run their homes as genuine partnerships. Still, the text gives one sex the named duty to preside. Young women are not imagining the contradiction when they ask why equality requires a permanent male head.
Calling this arrangement patriarchal is not an insult imported from outside the faith. It is a description of who may hold the highest offices, who may possess priesthood keys, and who has the last word. The church can defend that structure theologically. What it cannot do is replace the structure with stories about women's influence and expect the difference to disappear.
Patriarchal authority shaped the force of Mormon purity teaching. The phrase "purity culture" is not an official church term, but it describes an environment in which sexual worthiness, modesty, and the management of temptation receive intense religious attention. Boys were told to control their thoughts and behavior. Girls were also taught that how they dressed could affect the spiritual condition of boys and men.
In a 2005 general conference address about pornography, then-apostle Dallin H. Oaks spoke directly to girls: "if you dress immodestly, you are magnifying this problem by becoming pornography to some of the men who see you."[8] The wording did more than encourage modest clothing. It turned a girl's body into a potential instrument of another person's sin and assigned her part of the responsibility for his gaze.
The speaker's position intensified the message. This was not an awkward comment from a relative or a stray opinion from a local teacher. It came from an apostle at the church's highest public meeting. In a religion that teaches respect for priesthood authority, girls had strong reasons to hear it as spiritual instruction. A lesson about clothing could become a lesson about the danger of being seen.
That burden can follow women into worthiness interviews, dating, marriage, and their relationship with their own bodies. It can teach them to treat normal development as a threat that must be monitored by male authority. It can also complicate sexual harm by surrounding sexuality with shame before a girl has the language or power to distinguish consent, coercion, desire, and abuse. The retention surveys do not prove that these experiences drove most women out. Accounts gathered from former Latter-day Saints do identify body policing and sexual shame among the reasons some women give for leaving.[3]
The church has softened its approach. In 2022, Dieter F. Uchtdorf introduced a youth guide that relies less on detailed behavioral rules and more on principles and personal revelation. He said it does not provide a "yes or no" for every choice but focuses on "values, principles, and doctrine."[9] That is a real improvement. It gives teenagers more room to make moral decisions without treating a booklet as a measuring tape.
But changed wording does not erase earlier formation, and a principles-based guide does not remove the male authority structure surrounding sexual worthiness. Women now in their twenties and thirties may still carry lessons learned under the older approach. The church can retire a rule faster than a person can unlearn shame.
The third pressure comes from politics, though it is rarely experienced as politics alone. Young American women have moved left on abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender while the church continues to describe many of those questions as settled moral doctrine. National polling documents a widening ideological divide between young women and young men, along with stronger support among young women for abortion rights and same-sex marriage.[4]
The church opposes elective abortion for personal or social reasons, with possible exceptions for rape, incest, grave danger to the mother's life or health, or a fetus that cannot survive beyond birth.[6] Its teaching on marriage says sexual relations belong only within marriage between a man and a woman and that changes in civil law cannot change that moral rule.[7] National polling also places most American women on the other side of the church's narrow abortion policy.[5]
These teachings affect more than a ballot. They reach a woman's pregnancy, marriage, family, LGBTQ friends, and sense of moral agency. A member who disagrees may be told that the conflict is between personal preference and eternal truth. When the institution defining eternal truth is governed entirely by men, the disagreement can feel less like a neutral doctrinal dispute and more like male authority setting the terms of women's lives.
Political conflict can also expose how little room the system leaves for women to change institutional policy from within. There is no female quorum with authority equal to the Twelve Apostles. There is no path by which a woman can become bishop, stake president, apostle, or prophet and bring women's experience into the office where final decisions are made.[10][11] Women may advocate, but the men they are petitioning retain the power to decide whether that advocacy changes anything.
Not every politically liberal woman leaves, and not every woman who leaves is liberal. Some depart over church history, doctrine, local mistreatment, family conflict, or simple loss of belief. Still, political disputes can reveal the same underlying problem as purity culture: women are asked to trust rules about their bodies and relationships that they had no equal authority to create, interpret, or revise.
The church is not frozen. The newer youth guide is less prescriptive. In November 2025, the First Presidency lowered the minimum missionary age for women from 19 to 18, matching the starting age for men. The announcement still described missionary service as a priesthood duty for young men and an optional choice for young women, and it retained different service lengths.[14] The change removed one visible disparity without changing who holds priesthood keys.
More female speakers, committee seats, leadership meetings, and images of women in church media may make participation feel less lopsided. They can matter in daily church life. But they are reforms at the edges of a male-governed institution. If a woman may be heard but can never become the person with final ecclesiastical responsibility, inclusion remains conditional.
The research cannot tell us that patriarchy, purity, and politics explain every departure. It can tell us that the departure is gendered. The church's own handbooks and teachings show that the environment in which it occurs is gendered too. The most careful conclusion is not that one policy caused a mass exit. It is that many young women may be rejecting a system that values their labor while limiting their authority, regulates their sexuality through male leadership, and asks them to accept institutional positions that touch their bodies and closest relationships.
That possibility deserves more than another retention program. A church can improve mentoring, make lessons warmer, and invite women into more meetings while leaving the basic distribution of power untouched. Such changes may ease the experience of patriarchy. They do not end it.
The question facing the church is not whether its leaders can produce a theological defense of male priesthood government. They can. The question is whether they are willing to treat young women's departure as criticism of the structure itself. If the answer is always better messaging, more visible participation, or another revised booklet, the institution may keep studying why women leave while refusing to hear what they are saying.
Sources
[1] W. Justin Dyer, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Sam A. Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner, and David C. Dollahite. "Religious Retention." In Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention. BYU Studies, 2026.
[2] W. Justin Dyer, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Sam A. Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner, and David C. Dollahite. "Appendix A: Latter-day Saint Spiritual Seismology and Family Foundations of Youth Development Methods Survey Descriptions." In Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention. BYU Studies, 2026.
[3] Jana Riess. "Why Are So Many Young Women Leaving Mormonism?" Religion News Service, August 4, 2026.
[4] Lydia Saad, Sarah Elizabeth Jones, and Sarah Fioroni. "Exploring Young Women's Leftward Expansion." Gallup, September 12, 2024.
[5] Public Religion Research Institute. "Abortion Views Across All 50 States: Key Insights from PRRI's 2024 American Values Atlas." April 2025.
[6] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Abortion." Church Newsroom. Accessed August 6, 2026.
[7] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Same-Sex Marriage." Topics and Questions, 2023.
[8] Dallin H. Oaks. "Pornography." General Conference, April 2005.
[9] Dieter F. Uchtdorf. "Jesus Christ Is the Strength of Youth." General Conference, October 2022.
[10] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Relief Society: Work and Purpose." Accessed August 6, 2026.
[11] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "3. Priesthood Principles." General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2026.
[12] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "7. The Bishopric." General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2026.
[13] The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "The Family: A Proclamation to the World." September 23, 1995.
[14] The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Women Can Now Serve Missions for the Church of Jesus Christ at Age 18." Official statement, November 21, 2025.vember 21, 2025.
The headline figures establish the problem, but they do not explain it. The first survey used an online, opt-in panel, and its single-age estimates deserve caution.[2] Neither study followed every woman who left or asked her to name one controlling reason. The evidence supports a gendered retention problem, not a simple verdict about its cause.
The better question is what young women encounter when they compare the church's claims of female value with the institution they actually inhabit. Three pressures stand out: a patriarchal system that reserves final authority for men, a purity culture that has treated girls' bodies as spiritual risks, and a political posture increasingly distant from the views and lives of younger women. These pressures overlap. Together, they can turn belonging into a demand for submission.
Patriarchy
The church often answers criticism of women's status by pointing to participation. Women lead the Relief Society and Young Women organizations. They teach, speak in sacrament meeting, serve missions, organize aid, and counsel with male leaders. The church's own explanation says women may hold leadership responsibilities beginning at age 12. It also says they cannot serve in offices that require priesthood keys, including bishop, apostle, and prophet.[10]
That boundary matters because priesthood keys are where consultation ends and binding authority begins. The General Handbook says priesthood is conferred on worthy male members. Women may exercise delegated authority when they are set apart for a calling, but that authority is temporary and remains under the direction of those who preside.[11] A woman may be trusted with work, influence, and spiritual labor. She cannot become the person from whom the institution says the governing authority flows.
At the local level, the arrangement is especially clear. The bishop is the ward's presiding high priest, common judge, primary spiritual leader, and holder of the keys to lead the congregation. He oversees ward finances and bears responsibility for the Relief Society and Young Women organizations.[12] A Relief Society president may understand women's needs better than anyone else in the room, but she still serves inside a chain of authority that ends with a man.
This is why visibility cannot settle the question. A woman can speak, organize, persuade, and advise. A male priesthood leader can approve budgets, issue callings and releases, conduct worthiness interviews, and make the final decision. Those roles are not equal simply because both are described as service. One is participation within the system. The other governs the system.
The same hierarchy reaches into the church's ideal of family life. The Family Proclamation says fathers are to preside and provide, while mothers are primarily responsible for nurture. It then calls husbands and wives equal partners.[13] Many believing couples interpret that language generously and run their homes as genuine partnerships. Still, the text gives one sex the named duty to preside. Young women are not imagining the contradiction when they ask why equality requires a permanent male head.
Calling this arrangement patriarchal is not an insult imported from outside the faith. It is a description of who may hold the highest offices, who may possess priesthood keys, and who has the last word. The church can defend that structure theologically. What it cannot do is replace the structure with stories about women's influence and expect the difference to disappear.
Purity
Patriarchal authority shaped the force of Mormon purity teaching. The phrase "purity culture" is not an official church term, but it describes an environment in which sexual worthiness, modesty, and the management of temptation receive intense religious attention. Boys were told to control their thoughts and behavior. Girls were also taught that how they dressed could affect the spiritual condition of boys and men.
In a 2005 general conference address about pornography, then-apostle Dallin H. Oaks spoke directly to girls: "if you dress immodestly, you are magnifying this problem by becoming pornography to some of the men who see you."[8] The wording did more than encourage modest clothing. It turned a girl's body into a potential instrument of another person's sin and assigned her part of the responsibility for his gaze.
The speaker's position intensified the message. This was not an awkward comment from a relative or a stray opinion from a local teacher. It came from an apostle at the church's highest public meeting. In a religion that teaches respect for priesthood authority, girls had strong reasons to hear it as spiritual instruction. A lesson about clothing could become a lesson about the danger of being seen.
That burden can follow women into worthiness interviews, dating, marriage, and their relationship with their own bodies. It can teach them to treat normal development as a threat that must be monitored by male authority. It can also complicate sexual harm by surrounding sexuality with shame before a girl has the language or power to distinguish consent, coercion, desire, and abuse. The retention surveys do not prove that these experiences drove most women out. Accounts gathered from former Latter-day Saints do identify body policing and sexual shame among the reasons some women give for leaving.[3]
The church has softened its approach. In 2022, Dieter F. Uchtdorf introduced a youth guide that relies less on detailed behavioral rules and more on principles and personal revelation. He said it does not provide a "yes or no" for every choice but focuses on "values, principles, and doctrine."[9] That is a real improvement. It gives teenagers more room to make moral decisions without treating a booklet as a measuring tape.
But changed wording does not erase earlier formation, and a principles-based guide does not remove the male authority structure surrounding sexual worthiness. Women now in their twenties and thirties may still carry lessons learned under the older approach. The church can retire a rule faster than a person can unlearn shame.
Politics
The third pressure comes from politics, though it is rarely experienced as politics alone. Young American women have moved left on abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender while the church continues to describe many of those questions as settled moral doctrine. National polling documents a widening ideological divide between young women and young men, along with stronger support among young women for abortion rights and same-sex marriage.[4]
The church opposes elective abortion for personal or social reasons, with possible exceptions for rape, incest, grave danger to the mother's life or health, or a fetus that cannot survive beyond birth.[6] Its teaching on marriage says sexual relations belong only within marriage between a man and a woman and that changes in civil law cannot change that moral rule.[7] National polling also places most American women on the other side of the church's narrow abortion policy.[5]
These teachings affect more than a ballot. They reach a woman's pregnancy, marriage, family, LGBTQ friends, and sense of moral agency. A member who disagrees may be told that the conflict is between personal preference and eternal truth. When the institution defining eternal truth is governed entirely by men, the disagreement can feel less like a neutral doctrinal dispute and more like male authority setting the terms of women's lives.
Political conflict can also expose how little room the system leaves for women to change institutional policy from within. There is no female quorum with authority equal to the Twelve Apostles. There is no path by which a woman can become bishop, stake president, apostle, or prophet and bring women's experience into the office where final decisions are made.[10][11] Women may advocate, but the men they are petitioning retain the power to decide whether that advocacy changes anything.
Not every politically liberal woman leaves, and not every woman who leaves is liberal. Some depart over church history, doctrine, local mistreatment, family conflict, or simple loss of belief. Still, political disputes can reveal the same underlying problem as purity culture: women are asked to trust rules about their bodies and relationships that they had no equal authority to create, interpret, or revise.
Reform without shared authority
The church is not frozen. The newer youth guide is less prescriptive. In November 2025, the First Presidency lowered the minimum missionary age for women from 19 to 18, matching the starting age for men. The announcement still described missionary service as a priesthood duty for young men and an optional choice for young women, and it retained different service lengths.[14] The change removed one visible disparity without changing who holds priesthood keys.
More female speakers, committee seats, leadership meetings, and images of women in church media may make participation feel less lopsided. They can matter in daily church life. But they are reforms at the edges of a male-governed institution. If a woman may be heard but can never become the person with final ecclesiastical responsibility, inclusion remains conditional.
What young women may be rejecting
The research cannot tell us that patriarchy, purity, and politics explain every departure. It can tell us that the departure is gendered. The church's own handbooks and teachings show that the environment in which it occurs is gendered too. The most careful conclusion is not that one policy caused a mass exit. It is that many young women may be rejecting a system that values their labor while limiting their authority, regulates their sexuality through male leadership, and asks them to accept institutional positions that touch their bodies and closest relationships.
That possibility deserves more than another retention program. A church can improve mentoring, make lessons warmer, and invite women into more meetings while leaving the basic distribution of power untouched. Such changes may ease the experience of patriarchy. They do not end it.
The question facing the church is not whether its leaders can produce a theological defense of male priesthood government. They can. The question is whether they are willing to treat young women's departure as criticism of the structure itself. If the answer is always better messaging, more visible participation, or another revised booklet, the institution may keep studying why women leave while refusing to hear what they are saying.
Sources
[1] W. Justin Dyer, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Sam A. Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner, and David C. Dollahite. "Religious Retention." In Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention. BYU Studies, 2026.
[2] W. Justin Dyer, Jenet Jacob Erickson, Sam A. Hardy, Barbara Morgan Gardner, and David C. Dollahite. "Appendix A: Latter-day Saint Spiritual Seismology and Family Foundations of Youth Development Methods Survey Descriptions." In Latter-day Saint Trends in the United States: Religiousness, Well-Being, and Retention. BYU Studies, 2026.
[3] Jana Riess. "Why Are So Many Young Women Leaving Mormonism?" Religion News Service, August 4, 2026.
[4] Lydia Saad, Sarah Elizabeth Jones, and Sarah Fioroni. "Exploring Young Women's Leftward Expansion." Gallup, September 12, 2024.
[5] Public Religion Research Institute. "Abortion Views Across All 50 States: Key Insights from PRRI's 2024 American Values Atlas." April 2025.
[6] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Abortion." Church Newsroom. Accessed August 6, 2026.
[7] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Same-Sex Marriage." Topics and Questions, 2023.
[8] Dallin H. Oaks. "Pornography." General Conference, April 2005.
[9] Dieter F. Uchtdorf. "Jesus Christ Is the Strength of Youth." General Conference, October 2022.
[10] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Relief Society: Work and Purpose." Accessed August 6, 2026.
[11] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "3. Priesthood Principles." General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2026.
[12] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "7. The Bishopric." General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2026.
[13] The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "The Family: A Proclamation to the World." September 23, 1995.
[14] The First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Women Can Now Serve Missions for the Church of Jesus Christ at Age 18." Official statement, November 21, 2025.vember 21, 2025.
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