Women's psychology according to Carol Gilligan

Type of psychology: Social psychology

Gilligan’s theories of girls’ and women’s different moral voice and development led many researchers to examine the ways boys and girls, men and women develop morality and have been instrumental in drawing attention to the importance of the study of the lives of girls and women.

Introduction

Within the fields of the moral psychology and the psychology of women, Carol Gilligan, a developmental psychologist, has raised a number of important questions about moral psychology and has generated a great deal of research on girls and their development. Her theory about the “different voice” of girls and women, described in her 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, has been used to explain gender differences in such diverse fields as children’s play, the speech of children, adult conversation, women in academia, leadership style, career choice, war and peace studies, the professions of law, nursing, and teaching, and theories about women’s epistemologies (or ways of knowing).

Originally Gilligan’s work was conducted in the field of moral psychology. She followed a tradition of social scientists and moral philosophers who associated moral development with cognitive development. Gilligan argued that boys and men apply rational, abstract, or objective thought to moral questions; as a result, they are likely to appeal to the principle of justice when describing their thinking about moral issues. In contrast, Gilligan asserted, girls and women are more likely than boys and men to focus on the relationships between people and the potential for human suffering and harm. When this thinking is applied to moral issues, girls and women appeal to the ethic of care. The ethic of care, she claims, reflects women’s “different voice.”

In the preface written to the 1993 edition of her book, Gilligan describes “voice” as the core of the self. She calls it “a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds . . . a litmus test of relationships and a measure of psychological health.” Gilligan and colleagues in the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and the Development of Girls designed an interview and qualitative scoring method to study moral orientation and voice. They interviewed, held focus groups, and used sentence-completion measures to examine female adolescent and adult development. They argued that girls “lose voice” in adolescence; they dissociate from their real selves, a loss that puts them at risk for depression and anxiety.

Development of the Ethic of Care and Voice

Gilligan offers two explanations regarding how the ethic of care and women’s different voice develop. The first draws from the psychoanalytic theory of Nancy Chodorow. According to Chodorow, from infancy, both boys and girls develop a strong attachment to their mothers, which is the basis for their relational selves. However, during the Oedipal period (about age five), boys must separate from their mothers and must form an autonomous and separate identity as males. This leads them to repress their relational selves and identify with their fathers. For girls, it is not necessary to detach themselves psychologically from their mothers to develop a gender role identity as a female; their attachment to their mothers is not repressed, and girls maintain a strong relational self.

Gilligan claimed to find a developmental pattern in her study of women facing a decision to have an abortion, described in her 1982 book. The first level, called “orientation to individual survival,” focused on caring for oneself. The second level, called “goodness as self-sacrifice,” focused on care of self. The third level, “the morality of nonviolence,” is a morality of care for both self and others. Gilligan’s levels have not been validated in any subsequent studies, raising questions about whether the ethic of care is a developmental construct.

Gender socialization also affects women’s sense of self and is connected with the development of voice. According to Gilligan, society reinforces the male and female gender roles, rewarding boys and men for being autonomous, independent, and rational while their relational voices are silenced. In contrast, girls’ independent autonomous voices are silenced during adolescence when they experience a conflict. If they become “good women” by conforming to societal stereotypes, they risk losing their authentic (independent) self, or voice. However, if girls resist social pressures to conform to an ideal of femininity, they risk damaging their connections to others. Most girls do not resist and, as a consequence, learn to doubt their true selves.

Historical Context for Gilligan’s Theory

Gilligan’s theory of moral development was an attempt to correct psychological theories that overlooked the experiences of women or discredited women’s moral psychology. For example, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had claimed that women and men differ in their moral capacity because girls’ superegos are less developed than those of boys. While Freud found women’s morality inferior to men’s, Gilligan claimed that women’s moral thinking was different from men’s but of great, if not greater, moral value.

Gilligan’s theory drew from the developmental work of Lawrence Kohlberg but corrected what she claimed was a gender bias in Kohlberg’s theory. Kohlberg’s theory of moral development was based on six stages of moral thinking that develop universally in an invariant sequence as a result of maturation and experience. In 1969, Kohlberg published results comparing men’s and women’s moral reasoning and reported that women typically scored at stage three, “mutual interpersonal expectations, relationships, and conformity,” while men typically scored at stage four, “social system and conscience maintenance.” Since developmental theories such as Kohlberg’s assume that higher stages are more adequate, this was tantamount to saying that the moral reasoning of women was less developed than that of men. However, Kohlberg made no claim regarding gender differences in moral reasoning. It is likely that in the 1960s, when his study was conducted, his sample of working men and their wives had very different life experiences and that these differences account for his findings.

Gilligan’s influential book In a Different Voice entered the field of the psychology of women at an important time. In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers who were studying the psychology of women had argued that empirical evidence shows that psychological differences between men and women are small, and, if they exist at all, gender differences are due to socialization and experience. If no relevant differences exist, there is no basis for assigning men and women to different spheres; gender cannot be used to exclude women from education, political life, or work.

Androgyny theorists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to discredit claims of gender differences that denigrate women or bar them from educational or career opportunities. They argued that with proper gender role socialization, boys and girls, men and women would be equal in psychological attributes. However, by the late 1970s, feminist psychologists began pointing out that androgyny theory contained its own problems: the qualities of competitiveness, aggression, independence, and autonomy, which characterized the masculine norm, might not be the best ideal for either men or women. Some feminist psychologists, such as Jean Baker Miller, sought a new norm for human development, an ideal that celebrated the alternative, feminine virtues of care, concern for others, and the ability to maintain strong relationships with others.

In this postandrogyny period, Gilligan’s theory was hailed as a corrective to psychological studies based on male samples that posited masculinity as normative. Gilligan called attention to the study of adolescent girls and claimed to map a new psychological theory that begins with the experience of girls and women and reveals women’s different voice.

Research on Moral Reasoning, Moral Orientation, and Voice

Research on moral psychology shows that children are concerned with moral issues at a very early age. They care about “what’s fair,” and they are disturbed when someone has been hurt, suggesting that both justice and care orientations can be identified early in life. Research also shows that in Western culture, girls and women are expected to be more concerned with relationships and more in tune with their feelings than boys. However, a great deal of research since the 1970s has shown that girls and boys are not as different in moral reasoning and voice as Gilligan claims.

Studies using the Kohlbergian Moral Judgment Interview (MJI) reveal that males and females at the same age and educational levels are equally able to resolve moral dilemmas by appealing to justice principles. Similar results have been obtained with the Defining Issues Test (DIT), the most frequently used objective test of comprehension of and preference for moral issues. Meta-analysis on DIT scores reveals that education is 250 times more powerful than gender in predicting principled moral reasoning. Narrative and longitudinal studies also have shown that women are as likely as men at the same educational level to advance in the sequential order of development predicted from Kohlberg’s theory. In sum, evidence does not support the assertions that, compared with females, males are more principled in their moral reasoning, more concerned with conflicts resulting from conflicting claims about rights, or more capable of using abstract principles of justice in their moral reasoning. Evidence does not support the claim that Kohlberg’s theory or measure of moral reasoning is biased against girls or women.

Are women more caring or more relational than men? Are they more likely to be silenced, silence themselves, or lose their voice than men? The evidence to support or refute Gilligan’s assertion that the ethic of care characterizes female morality or voice is inconclusive. In part, this is because there are so many different ways that care and voice as psychological constructs are measured; it is difficult to compare across studies that operationalize the constructs differently. Different researchers view the ethic of care as a moral theory, an interpersonal orientation, a perceptual focus, or an epistemological theory. Voice is understood variously as a theory of self, a moral perspective, or a defensive posture. Furthermore, most of Gilligan’s qualitative studies of girls’ development only present girls’ voices, and gender differences cannot be tested.

Research on the ethic of care suggests that the majority of people, both males and females, can and do use both care and justice orientations. Some studies, particularly those conducted using Gilligan’s qualitative interview, report that females tend to focus on the care orientation and males on the justice orientation, particularly in self-identified moral dilemmas. While qualitative research is very important in developing a theory and understanding a construct, testing specific hypotheses (such as that there are gender differences in voice) requires quantitative studies. Most such studies fail to support Gilligan’s theory of gender differences in moral orientation.

Some researchers have found that whether someone uses an ethic of care or an ethic of justice depends on the type of moral dilemma they discuss. Lawrence J. Walker and his colleagues found that when participants talk about their own moral dilemmas, females were more likely to identify interpersonal dilemmas, whereas males were more likely to choose impersonal dilemmas. If respondents focus on people and their relationships (a friend who betrays another friend), they are more likely to see that the ethic of care has been violated. If respondents focus on issues in which the rights of others are violated or societal rules are transgressed (breaking a law), they are more likely to be concerned about justice. Interpersonal conflicts elicit a care orientation, while issues of conflicting rights elicit a justice orientation for both men and women. However, when asked to think about an issue differently, both boys and girls are able to change and use either justice or care reasoning.

Gilligan’s studies of adolescent girls’ voices, using her methods of interview, focus groups, and open-ended sentence-completion measures, depict a conflicted adolescence, loss of voice, and growing dissociation from what girls know. While some girls resist, most strive to retain their relationships and thus seek to please others even if it means developing an inauthentic self.

Research conducted by Susan Harter using more standardized measures and large samples of both boys and girls indicates that adolescence is a challenging time for girls and that they are concerned about their relationships. Girls feel silenced by others and they silence themselves, but not more so than adolescent boys. Harter’s studies of loss of voice indicate that there are no gender differences in voice, that girls do not have lower levels of voice than boys, and that voice does not decline with age.

In a 2010 Psychology Today article published shortly after the nomination of US Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, Jesse Prinz summarized research findings from the 1980s onward regarding gender differences in moral judgment, both in the general population and in judicial proceedings. According to Prinz, women in general tend to exhibit more empathy and collectivism in moral decision making than do men. In the courtroom, female judges are more conservative and punitive in judging criminal cases (particularly those involving offenses against women), more liberal in deciding civil liberties cases, and more politically partisan overall than their male counterparts. Although such findings do not point explicitly and unequivocably to the ethic of care versus the ethic of justice, such findings do appear to support the overarching theory of gender difference in moral judgment.

Gender Difference Research

Given the empirical results that gender differences, when they exist, are small and usually attributable to different socialization, why do such claims persist? In part the answer lies in the methodology that is used in research on gender. Gilligan and her colleagues’ work, particularly their research using qualitatively analyzed interviews, leads to the conclusion that there are large differences in the ways boys and girls view moral issues, think, react emotionally, and commit to relationships. However, studies that use standardized measures to compare men and women reveal more similarities than differences. Either conclusion has important implications.

Rachel Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Marecek claim that since knowledge in the social sciences is always incomplete, interpretation of events, including research findings, is always subject to bias. They suggest that two forms of bias influence beliefs about gender differences. Alpha bias is the tendency to emphasize gender difference; beta bias is the tendency to emphasize similarity. In beta bias, underemphasizing gender differences can lead to ignoring the different resources men and women need. In contrast, alpha bias, overestimating differences, can lead one to advocate different roles for men and women. If women are more caring, ought they be the caregivers? If men are more justice oriented, ought they be judges? If there is no difference in moral orientation between boys and girls, ought all children be taught to use both principles? Ought care and justice be expected from all adults?

Gilligan’s Contribution

Gilligan raised important questions in the field of the psychology of morality and in so doing drew attention to the ethic of care. While the gender differences that she originally asserted have not been found, her work draws on the experiences of girls and women in ways that value those experiences. Her insistence that studying the lives of girls is as important as studying the lives of boys brought a good deal of research attention that may lead to new knowledge and new ways to promote the well-being of all boys and girls, men and women.

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