Mormon Land: The General Conference gender gap why it should change and how it can. [Video]

The inequity at the pulpit is stark: Women speak and are quoted far less.

President Russell Nelson, worldwide leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has urged women to be seen and be heard, to speak up and speak out — in their communities, in their homes and in their congregations.

That may be happening at the grassroots level, but it isn’t occurring in the patriarchal faith’s highest-profile forum: General Conference. In the most recent gathering, only two of the 33 speakers were women. Even in past conferences, that number rarely reached a handful.

Researcher Eliza Wells, a doctoral student in philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied this phenomenon in conferences over a 50-year period for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and discovered an even deeper chasm: Men were at least 16 times more likely to be quoted over the pulpit than women — a gap that holds true even when women were speaking.

It’s an inequity that many women and men …