Think about what you’d guess if asked to describe daily life inside a religious community — assumptions about who works, who studies, who stays home. Pew Research Center tried to actually measure that, at least for one faith group, so you don’t have to rely on a guess. The new findings, released this month, show a measurable shift in education among Latter-day Saint women over the past two decades. Here’s what the data says, and how you can check it yourself.
The degree gap that closed since 2007
In 2007, about 25% of Latter-day Saint women held a bachelor’s degree. In Pew’s newly published data, covering the 2023-24 survey period, that share has grown to 40%.
That’s a 15-point jump in under two decades — not a small movement, if you’re used to thinking of religious communities as slow to change. Pew frames it as one of the clearer generational shifts in its new report on the faith.
You don’t need any outside context to see the size of that change. A quarter of women holding a degree, versus four in ten today, is a different picture of who’s sitting in the room.
How Pew reached this number
The findings come from Pew’s own survey of 565 current Latter-day Saints — 414 lifelong members and 151 converts — along with 316 former members. That’s a sizable, purpose-built sample for studying one specific faith group.
Those respondents were drawn from Pew’s much larger 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, which surveyed 36,908 U.S. adults overall. This isn’t a one-off poll you should take with a grain of salt — it’s a subset pulled from one of the largest religion surveys Pew runs, so you can trust the sample size behind it.
That combination — a large umbrella study plus a targeted follow-up sample — is standard practice for how Pew tries to measure a smaller religious group precisely instead of guessing at it.
Support for women in the workforce also rose
Education isn’t the only number worth your attention here. Pew also found that support among Latter-day Saints for women being in the workforce rose from 49% in 2014 to 61% in the 2023-24 survey.
That’s a 12-point increase in under a decade, on a separate question entirely — attitudes, not just outcomes. Pew reports both figures side by side in the same new release.
You can read that either as fast movement or as simply catching up to where attitudes already stood elsewhere. Pew’s report doesn’t take a position on which explanation fits — it just publishes the number.
The survey behind the survey
Pew is explicit about scope here: the questions this piece draws on focus on demographics like education and workforce attitudes, both collected as part of the broader 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study. The report doesn’t attempt to explain why the numbers moved.
You won’t find Pew speculating about causes in these topline figures — just the measurements themselves, for you to weigh however you like. That restraint is part of what makes the data useful as a plain, checkable “snapshot” rather than an argument.
For a demographic finding like this one, that distinction matters to how you should read it: it’s a measurement of what survey respondents reported, not a verdict on any of it.
Two numbers, one generational shift
Put the two figures next to each other and a pattern emerges: more Latter-day Saint women hold bachelor’s degrees, and more of the broader community supports women working outside the home, than a decade or two ago. Pew’s new report is the first to put hard numbers on both trends at once.
You don’t need an opinion on the trend to find the numbers notable. They’re simply a documented change, datable and sourced, in how life looks for women in this faith community compared with a generation back — a shift you can look up yourself.
If you try one thing, make it this: if you want the underlying tables — sample sizes, exact margins, the full breakdown by year — Pew’s report is public and free to read, worth five minutes if you like checking numbers yourself before repeating them.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.