In a Different Voice

1982

Carol Gilligan (b. 1936)

How do people resolve real-life moral dilemmas? This was the question that intrigued Carol Gilligan when she came to Harvard as an instructor of psychology in the late 1960s. Her interest was sparked by Lawrence Kohlberg’s research on Moral Development. Kohlberg’s work had shown that women do not generally exhibit the highest level of moral reasoning, termed “justice-oriented reasoning,” as often as men. But Gilligan wanted to take her research in a different direction. Whereas Kohlberg’s participants had responded to hypothetical moral dilemmas, Gilligan decided to interview participants facing the real-life dilemma of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

In the course of conducting her research, she had a startling insight: the reason women scored lower in Kohlberg’s scheme was because it was based entirely on results from male participants, yet it was taken to represent a universal standard. By including only men in his studies, he had missed other styles and forms of reasoning. Gilligan described the style of reasoning she heard in her participants’ accounts as an “ethic of care”; that is, women repeatedly told her that their decisions about whether or not to have an abortion were based on the value of remaining in a relationship and not inflicting pain on others.

She wrote up her study and her conclusions in the landmark book In a Different Voice: A Psychological Theory of Women’s Development, published in 1982. In it she argued that women’s moral decision-making processes did not map well onto prevailing psychological theories constructed within an all-male framework. She outlined the ethic of care and suggested that although it was more commonly used by women, we should seek to make it a more prominent part of all human development. Her work continues to influence the debate about gender differences, but perhaps more important, it exposed the deeply androcentric basis of much of psychological theory up to that time.

SEE ALSO Moral Development (1958), Gender Identity (1963)

Desire (Reverie) by German painter and architect Heinrich Vogeler, c. 1900. Carol Gilligan initiated what is now a major project to articulate important gender differences in development, especially around moral issues.