Whether women may be ordained to religious leadership divides the major traditions sharply and along lines that have shifted substantially within living memory. Reform Judaism ordained its first female rabbi, Sally Priesand, in 1972, followed by Reconstructionist and later Conservative Judaism, while Orthodox Judaism has largely not adopted rabbinic ordination for women, though some Modern Orthodox institutions now grant women clergy roles under other titles.
Protestant Christianity is internally divided rather than uniform: most mainline denominations, including many Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican provinces, ordain women to the full range of clergy roles, the Church of England doing so from 1994 for priests and 2014 for bishops, while evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant bodies vary widely, some ordaining women and others maintaining male only leadership on complementarian theological grounds.
The Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Christianity maintain a male only priesthood as settled doctrine rather than open policy, a position restated authoritatively for Catholicism in 1994. Sunni and Shia Islam do not have an ordained clergy in the Christian sense, but the comparable question of women leading prayer or serving as imams remains genuinely contested within contemporary Islamic legal and theological debate.