Bresee ordained women and the early Nazarenes did so as a matter of course: estimates put women at roughly a fifth of ordained Nazarene ministers in the denomination's first decades, and women founded and pastored churches across the movement. The proportion fell sharply from the 1940s onward, as the denomination built seminaries, standardised credentialing and moved into a suburban American culture with settled expectations about who stands in a pulpit. The Articles and the Manual never changed — women have always been eligible for ordination and are now — but the practice did, and the gap between the two has been an acknowledged embarrassment. The denomination has run initiatives to recover it since the 1980s with modest results in North America; the picture in the Africa and Asia-Pacific regions differs region by region.