Putting Women Into the Equation

When Ms. magazine featured a Harvard professor on its cover last December, it sold more copies than a month earlier, when the feminist periodical spotlighted rock star Bette Midler.

The academic with the big selling power was Carol Gilligan, associate professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education, who Ms. named "Woman of the Year."

A few months after the Ms. story. The New York Times also focused public attention on Gilligan, heralding her as a "vanguard" of a movement of new psychological research on women.

Gilligan's recent national exposure is the result of her pioneering research on the differences between male and female moral reasoning and the conclusions she has drawn about human development.

Her work, Ms. editor Ruth Sullivan says, "will have a profound effect on the way people think about women for years to come."

Gilligan's research reveals that while men tend to make decisions based on concern for rules, justice and individual rights, women's moral decisions more often are relative to the situation and place a greater emphasis on an ethic of care and on the preservation of relationships.

Traditional theories of development like that of Lawrence Kohlberg, professor of Education and Social Psychology, show a child progressing from a concern with the context of the situation and maintaining relationships to higher stages where decisions grow out of a principled devotion to justice and individual rights.

Gilligan, who is 46, argues that these stages don't fairly represent the ethic of care and responsibility that she has found in her interviews with girls and women. "Women just don't fit the schemes." Gilligan says, adding, "rather than finding problems in female development. I find problems in the schemes."

Gilligan's work marks the first time anyone has studied female moral development. "Before Gilligan's work there wasn't enough material to write a chapter on girls and moral develpment," says Edith Phelps, the director of a new center for the study of gender, education and human development at the Ed School.

"Females have always been discrepant data. I'm using the discrepent data to explicate female development and new theory," Gilligan says, pointing to the male-oriented research of Kohlberg, Erik Erickson and Jean Piaget.

In her recent book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan cites an interview with two 11-year-olds, a boy and a girl, explaining the differences in their moral reasoning processes and the implications of using the traditional stage theory of development to evaluate the children.

When confronted with a moral problem--whether or not a poor man should steal a drug for his dying wife that the druggist would not give him--the boy and girl responded differently in ways that, according to Gilligan, reveal the two distinct moral voices.

Jake, the 11-year-old boy, had little trouble deciding that the husband should steal the drug. His reasoning that a "human life is worth more than money" would, Gilligan says, place him at a high stage of development on a traditional scale, one that shows a principled concern for fairness and deductive logical thinking.

Eleven-year-old Amy's reasoning follows a different path. She is reluctant to let the man steal the drug because she thinks he might be able to solve his dilemma by negotiating with the druggist. She has trouble understanding the druggist's refusal to provide the drug free of charge, his lack of care and concern. Gilligan argues that this difference of approach reveals that women tend to focus on care and on the relationships in a particular situation rather than on principles of justice or fairness.

On Kohlberg's scale, Amy is placed on a lower level than Jake because she "seemed to reveal a feeling of powerlessness in the world, an inability to think systematically about the concepts of morality or law."

Gilligan has set out to "remap" the traditional schemes of human development, and to reverse the traditional theories of development which place male-oriented reasoning on a higher level than female values. She is currently working on a theory that would combine a concern for both the self and for others and an emphasis on both justice and care at an ultimate stage of human development.

"There is a need to represent, in the mapping of development, a non-hierarchical image of human connection and to embody in the vision of maturity the reality of interdependence," she says.

Gilligan's Harvard colleagues say that she has made an important contribution to the field of developmental psychology. David McClelland, professor of psychology, says that Gilligan's work was "very much needed." The field was incomplete, he says, because prior theories dealt strictly with male development. He says that her perspective which he calls "the first of its kind" is sure to be influential in the field for years to come.

Jerome Kagan, professor of developmental psychology, says that "many books have been written about the psychology of sex differences, but the majority haven't been deep or profound. Carol is one of the few people who has written an insightful book on the subject." But McClelland says that while Gilligan's work has received acclaim in the academic community she has "quite a way to go to develop empirical backing for the female perspective she describes."

Gilligan is in the process of finishing up a four-year study of adolescent girls that she hopes will further substantiate some of the findings that she first articulated in her book.

These findings result from week long visits to the all girls Emma Willard school in Troy, N.Y. where Gilligan conducts extensive interviews with the students three times a year.

The justice and caring orientations manifest themselves at Emma Willard. One of the girls that she had placed in the "justice" category turned in two of her fellow classmates for cheating, while more of the "caring-oriented" girls than the "justice oriented" ones handed in a survey that Gilligan had distributed.

Gilligan uses these findings of both voices to back up her assertion that the "different voice" she uncovered does not completely characterize female moral reasoning, although it can dominate it.

She has found a concern with "fairness and rights" as well as "care and response" in females she has interviewed. She has also detected both "voices" in males. Thus, Gilligan argues, these combined perspectives should be included in a stage of maturity on a developmental scale.

Gilligan's work has influenced research efforts outside of her field, says Diana Eck, professor of religion. She adds that Gilligan's ideas about gender differences and moral reasoning are "a generative paradigm for thinking about women and ethics in a cross-cultural sense."

Trudy Hammer, associate principal at the Emma Willard School, says that as a result of Gilligan's findings on female moral develoment, the school is in the process of overhauling its curriculum and placing more emphasis on collaborative learning and less on the more autonomous, competitive techniques. "We're trying to move away from the male way of doing things" she says.

Hammer says that she has received countless phone calls from other secondary schools, co-ed and single-sex, expressing interest in Gilligan's work.

Although Gilligan is pleased with the national attention that her work has been receiveing, she has no interest in becoming a "media figure". "I went ahead with the Ms. article because I though it would encourage women to take their values seriously" she says.

She has had to turn down requests for media appearances and speaking engagements because "I don't have enough time for them between my family, my research, and my teaching".

Gilligan's courses on adolescents and moral development draw the largest enrollments of any courses at the Ed School, with more than 150 students enrolled in one of her courses last spring. "I've always been very involved in teaching, and I plan to stay involved. My teaching has always been closely connected to my research. My students provide an important source of my intellectual questioning."

Catherine Steiner-Adair, a doctoral student at the Ed School who is an advisee of Gilligan's and has taken several of her courses, says that Gilligan is a devoted teacher who shares her developing ideas with her students.

"Learning from her is a very different experience than from a professor who only presents finished ideas." Steiner-Adair adds.

Victor Williams, president of the Ed School Student Government, says that Gilligan was chosen by students to deliver last year's Commencement address because she has managed to show a "genuine concern" for the Ed School student while maintaing a high public profile.

"She has been able to keep the delicate balance between giving her time to the public at large and teaching and counseling Ed School students" he adds.