Women in Youth Ministry Need Each Other
For stress management, women especially need other women.
As I mentioned in a recent note, I’ve begun been reading up on the differences between males and females in how we process and respond to stress. I’m finding a lot of fascinating information that I wish I had known earlier.
One helpful resource I’ve come across is Shelley Taylor’s The Tending Instinct, which discusses women’s tendencies to care for others and to seek out care from others in times of distress. It’s a biological instinct that is more pronounced in females than males.
In from chapter 6, Taylor shares about a social psychology experiment which observed that women preferred to wait with other women when anticipating a threatening event, while men preferred to wait alone. Later, a similar study found that, given the choice, women would rather wait alone than wait with a man when anticipating the same threatening event. In stress studies in a laboratory setting, psychologists discovered one reason this may be the case: “Women’s stress responses are typically greater, not lower, in response to a supportive male companion (even if he is the woman’s own boyfriend!), but when the supportive companion is another woman, stress responses usually go down.”
In other words, not only do women turn to others in stress, but they specifically tend to turn to other women (much more than men turn to their male companions for help). This makes sense to me. Elsewhere, I’ve read that women tend to internalize our stress and carry emotions heavier (whereas men gravitate more toward external ways of processing their stress). So logically it follows that we would feel the need to connect and talk with others about our inner turmoil - and that we’d want to do that with others who understand our experience.
This matters because being a woman in youth ministry can be a very isolating and lonely experience, as I’ve written before. These gender differences in how we process and manage stress would seem to suggest that loneliness has a greater impact on women. To be sure, loneliness is a hard and dangerous thing for men in ministry as well. But for women, female companions are especially needed to process and manage our ministry stressors and emotions, whereas men tend to prefer other ways of processing and managing their stressors and emotions. (Moreover, the finding that women’s stress levels may increase in the presence of a male companion may mean that women who have primarily male coworkers in ministry may experience higher stress levels than we realize!)
If women are lonely in ministry, then they’re also likely more stressed and struggling internally than we realize. Women in ministry need other women in ministry as companions. If we want our female ministry leaders to thrive, we need to tend to this factor.
So women in youth ministry, seek out these connections! Your stress levels may rise and fall with the strength of your connections to other women in ministry.