Scientology and gender
Scientology beliefs and practices regarding gender
Scientology has a complex relationship with concepts of gender roles and discrimination, as while the core beliefs of Scientology hold humans to consist of genderless Thetans, the Church and other Scientology organizations have frequently been noted as upholding discriminatory policies or views based on the original writings of founder L. Ron Hubbard.
Roy Wallis, in 1976 wrote in The Road to Total Freedom that the Scientologist population was 59% male and 41% female, a number referenced on The Auditor, a publication of the Church of Scientology. In 1988, a participant observer study from the University of Copenhagen showed that the average participant in the Church of Scientology Copenhagen was a 35-year-old man. Though the numbers are not great in disparity, "they provide non-census evidence supporting the contention that more men than women become member of CoS," Tollefson and Lewis write.
Gender roles
In his book Scientology: A New Slant on Life, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote the following passages:
A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out [...] The historians can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women. This is not a sermon on the role or position of women; it is a statement of bald and basic fact.
Hubbard's Scientology: A History of Man additionally fails to use gender-neutral language.
These passages, along with other ones of a similar nature from Hubbard, have been criticized by Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice as expressions of hatred towards women.
The traditional Scientology wedding ceremony includes these remarks on men and women:
Now, (groom's name), girls need clothes and food and tender happiness and frills, a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat. All caprice if you will, but still they need them.
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