According to a 2008 Pew survey "two-thirds of all women surveyed pray daily, while less than half of all men surveyed do." Tanya Luhrmann's theory as to why:
Women pray more because women are more comfortable with their imaginations, and in order to pray, you need to use your imagination. Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that God is a product of the imagination. I am instead noting that to know God intimately, you need to use your imagination, because the imagination is the means humans must use to know the immaterial. This, by the way, is something the church fathers knew well. For Augustine, the road to God ran through the mind. It is our own peculiar era that equates the imagination with the frivolous and the unreal. That is why contemporary Christians sometimes get nervous about the word imagination. But they shouldn't. C. S. Lewis knew so well that the imagination was a path to God that he entitled a chapter of Mere Christianity "Let's Pretend." "Let us pretend," Lewis writes, "to turn the pretence into a reality."
Earlier coverage of Luhrmann's book here. More on the neuroscience of prayer here.
The Dish 