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Women don’t count in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I say this not as a critique of male Mormons’ attitudes towards women, nor as a doctrinal proposition, nor yet as the cri de coeur of a woman who has been scorned or abused by a church leader. I say it simply as a matter of bureaucratic fact.

A fully functional Mormon ward, able to administer all the requisite ordinances outside of the temple, can be constituted with exactly one woman–the bishop’s wife–because we are still sticklers about that NT “husband of one wife” standard. A branch can be constituted with no women. When deciding whether to create a new unit in any of the stakes of Zion, the only tally that matters is the number of active Melchizedek priesthood holders.

Obviously, a church with no women would look very different than what most of us have experienced, and women and children are valued members of our families and wards and branches. I don’t believe that Mormon men don’t care about women, or go around thinking “we don’t really need women, so why should I listen to them?” But the stark institutional reality is that women are not needed. This is structural sexism. It is prior to contemporary Mormons’ attitudes towards women–that is, it is not a system deliberately designed to discriminate against women because Church leaders are chauvinistic or misogynist; it is merely the ground on which their consciousness of gender is formed. Mormon children learn early and without being explicitly taught that men have more authority and can do more things at Church than women. When I say that the Church is “sexist,” I am pointing to this structural reality.

But that is not what most Mormons respond to when they hear the word sexism. Instead, they are likely to be defensive about their own progressive attitudes towards women, citing examples of bishops who willingly listen to women and value their opinions, or Mormon men who go out of their way to show the women they interact with how much they care about “women’s issues.” Perhaps the most famous example of this reflexive response is Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” gaffe. He was asked a question about historical and structural issues in the economy that cause women in the aggregate to earn significantly less than men. He responded by detailing his personal efforts to recruit individual women and (presumably) pay them well. That might have been the most Mormon moment of his campaign.

I suspect that part of the reason Mormons are especially* susceptible to this kind of blindness to the effects of institutional structure is that we are predisposed to see the Church itself, not just the gospel, as “true.” It’s understandable that people who believe their leaders are prophets would conclude that the organizational structure they dictate is divinely approved. It seems like a futile exercise to discern how much inspiration is involved in the creation of any given program or Church bureaucracy, so we readily presume that the whole institution is perfect. And that means we don’t think very much about how organizational structure influences behavior and belief. I was in college before I read Meg Wheatley’s article examining the effects of structural incentives on the efforts and involvement of Mormons in their church Despite having grown up in a family that tolerated (some) criticism of Church programs and plenty of doctrinal dispute, and despite having, apparently, had a feminist awakening well before Kindergarten, I had never once thought systematically about the Church as an organization that could be fitted into an organizational chart for analysis.

Up until that point in my life, the goodness of the individual men in my life–my dad, my Sunday School teachers, my bishops and Stake Presidents–had sheltered me from the effects of a sexist structure. I think many women go through their whole lives this way, and I am glad for them. Women who are happy in the Church exactly the way it is are not suffering from false consciousness. I believe that most men who accept callings in the church do so because they are good and want to bless others. I believe that the structure of the church provides an extraordinarily effective vehicle for them to do exactly that. The socialization of men in the church very often produces exceptionally thoughtful, committed, and loving husbands and fathers.

But (you knew that was coming…) the institutional superfluity of women means that Mormon children absorb certain messages about what women are and can do that will come into conflict with what they learn elsewhere, and what their own divine nature whispers to them. It’s possible that God could not call latter-day Deborahs and Huldahs and Annas and Junias and Priscillas, because those callings have become literally unthinkable for people raised as Latter-day Saints. The reason to consider carefully which parts of the Church’s structure are inspired and which are the result of tradition, or adoption from the business world, or simple thoughtlessness, is that organizational structures and cultures are powerful tools for shaping behavior. In the same pre-conscious way that it matters whether some pilots are women, it matters whether boys and men see women in positions of leadership and power. I imagine God can (eventually) work around such human limitations, but we should be sure that we are not making God’s work more difficult by failing to attend to what we already know about how human minds and spirits develop. Structural sexism communicates damaging messages, even when it is not motivated by chauvinism or misogyny. I believe with my whole heart that those are not the messages God wants either his daughters or his sons to receive from the Church. I also believe that God trusts us, women and men, to work out these questions together, and lends us all the power and inspiration we need to truly build Zion, if only we will.

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*–though by no means uniquely susceptible, as witnessed by the endless efforts of people of color to educate white folk about structural and institutional racism, and white folks’ unrelenting

defensiveness about their own lack of personal animus toward individual black people…