ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, Carol Gilligan posed the question of whether moral thinking was distinctively gendered in North American society, and whether the field of developmental psychology had recognized this appropriately in its traditional theorizing and research (Gilligan, 1977, 1982). Gilligan argued that women think about morality in ways distinct from men, focusing their concerns around considerations of “care,” relationships, and the needs of others and the self. In contrast, men’s reasoning on this subject centers more around considerations of “justice” and the rights of self and others (as elucidated by Piaget and Kohlberg in the traditional developmental research in this area; for example, Kohlberg, 1976). Gilligan’s central claim, then, was that the “voice” of women had been largely ignored in previous theory and research on this topic.
