Sub-Saharan Africa

Many countries have laws that ban or limit women from wearing religious attire in public places. By comparison, far fewer countries require women to wear particular types of attire for religious reasons.

While Christian women are on the whole more religious than Christian men, Muslim women and Muslim men have similar levels of religious commitment. And when it comes to attendance at worship services, Muslim men are more active than Muslim women.

Generally, women are more likely than men to be affiliated with a religious organization; women also pray more, and are more inclined to say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Standard lists of history’s most influential religious leaders – among them Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) – tend to be predominantly, if not exclusively, male. Many religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews, allow only men to be clergy, while others, including some denominations in the evangelical Protestant tradition, have lifted that restriction only in recent decades. Yet it often appears that the ranks of the faithful are dominated by women.

People in emerging and developing nations are quickly catching up to those in advanced nations in terms of access to technology.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, both economically and socially, technology adoption remains one of the defining factors in human progress. To that end, there has been a noticeable rise over the past two years in the percentage of people in the emerging and developing nations surveyed by Pew Research Center who say that they use the internet and own a smartphone.

The view that torture may be justified is most common in sub-Saharan Africa, where a median of 55% hold this view; it is least common in Latin America (a median of 25%). In the U.S., 58% say torture can be justified as part of efforts to prevent terrorist attacks.

Americans place less importance on religion in their lives than do people in a number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia -- but more than residents of many other Western and European countries.

The three countries on the pope’s itinerary -- Uganda, Kenya and the Central African Republic -- all have sizable Catholic populations. But they also have seen violent clashes in recent years.

The regulation of abortion may vary widely from country to country, but nearly all nations – 96% – allow women to terminate their pregnancies in order to save their lives.