Carol Gilligan

Introduction

Carol Gilligan (born November 28, 1936) is an American psychologist and ethicist whose work redirected the study of moral development. She is the author of In a Different Voice (1982), which argued that the leading theories of moral development — built largely on studies of boys — measured against a male norm and therefore read women's moral reasoning as deficient rather than different.

From that critique Gilligan developed the ethics of care, a moral orientation organized around relationships, responsibility, and the avoidance of harm, which she set against the ethics of justice favored by rights-based and principle-based theories. Her insistence that care is a mature moral voice rather than a developmental shortfall reshaped debates in psychology, education, philosophy, law, and nursing.

Gilligan spent some three decades on the Harvard faculty, where she held the university's first chair in gender studies, before moving to New York University as a University Professor. In June 2025 the Inamori Foundation named her the Kyoto Prize laureate in Arts and Philosophy for pioneering a new horizon for the ethic of care.

Early Life and Education

Gilligan was born Carol Friedman in New York City, the only child of William Friedman, a lawyer, and Mabel Caminez, a nursery school teacher. She was raised in a Jewish household and attended the public Hunter Model School and then the Walden School, a progressive private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where she studied piano seriously.

She took her bachelor's degree summa cum laude in English literature from Swarthmore College in 1958, followed by a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College — sources differ on the year, with Radcliffe-era records giving 1960 and other biographies 1961. Her graduate training then moved to Harvard, where she completed a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1964 with a dissertation titled "Responses to Temptation: An Analysis of Motives."

The literary rather than purely psychological foundation of her education proved consequential. Gilligan would later build her case out of close readings of what people actually said in interviews, an approach closer to textual interpretation than to the standardized scoring of a stage interview. Between degrees she also stepped away from academic life for a time to work in modern dance, returning to the university world in the mid-1960s.

Academic and Professional Career

Gilligan began teaching as a lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1965, then became a lecturer at Harvard in 1967, where she taught alongside Erik Erikson and worked with Lawrence Kohlberg on his research program in moral development. She joined the Harvard Graduate School of Education as an assistant professor in 1971 and rose to associate and then full professor; biographies differ on the tenure year, giving either 1986 or 1988, and the same divergence appears in accounts of her associate professorship.

Her institutional appointments reflect how interdisciplinary her work became. She held the Laurie Chair in Women's Studies at Rutgers University in 1986–1987, was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 1994, and in 1997 took the Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies — Harvard's first professorship in gender studies. She was a founding member of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and the Development of Girls, begun in 1987, and co-directed The Company of Women and Girls.

In 2002 Gilligan left Harvard for New York University, joining both the school of education and the school of law as a University Professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology; she had already been a visiting professor at NYU's law school from 1998. She remained a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge's Centre for Gender Studies until 2009, taught a semester at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2015, and has continued publishing with collaborators including David A. J. Richards and Naomi Snider. She is married to the psychiatrist James Gilligan, former director of Harvard Medical School's Center for the Study of Violence, and they have three sons.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The critique of stage theories of moral development

Gilligan's target was the empirical and theoretical scaffolding of Kohlberg's six stages of moral development. The original research had followed a sample of adolescent boys, and in subsequent applications women tended to cluster at Stage 3 — the "good boy/nice girl" level at which morality is understood as interpersonal concordance — while men were more often scored at the higher stages organized around contracts, rights, and universal principles. Gilligan argued that the scoring scheme itself was at fault: a theory that equates moral maturity with detachment from particular relationships will necessarily rank concern for those relationships as immature.

Her most cited illustration contrasted two eleven-year-olds' answers to the Heinz dilemma. "Jake" treated the dilemma as a logical problem to be resolved by ranking competing rights; "Amy" kept returning to the relational consequences. Under Kohlberg's scoring Jake's answer was more advanced. Gilligan read Amy's answer not as a failure of abstraction but as a different moral intelligence — one asking what will actually happen to the people involved.

The ethics of care

Out of that critique came the ethics of care: a moral orientation in which responsibility to particular others, responsiveness to need, and the maintenance of relationship take priority over the impartial application of rules. Gilligan traced its development through three levels, from a concern for one's own survival, through goodness understood as self-sacrifice for others, to a mature position in which care is generalized into a prohibition on hurting anyone — oneself included — and self and others are held in balance.

She has repeatedly insisted that the different voice is not a female voice. As she put it in In a Different Voice, the voice she described is "characterized not by gender but theme"; its association with women is an empirical observation rather than a claim about sex. What she did argue was structural: because girls and women have been placed inside relationships rather than authorized to speak from outside them, their moral language has been systematically under-described and then dismissed.

Listening methods and the study of voice

Because Gilligan held that standardized instruments could not register the phenomenon she was describing, her methodological contribution became nearly as influential as her theory. Working largely with open-ended interviews about both hypothetical and real-life dilemmas, she and her students developed voice-sensitive procedures, including the "Listener's Guide" written with Lyn Mikel Brown, in which transcripts are read several times for plot, for the speaker's self-representation, and for their relation to the researcher and to surrounding social discourse. The approach helped legitimize qualitative, interview-based work in a corner of psychology dominated by scored stage measures.

Girls' development, adolescence, and loss of voice

From the late 1980s Gilligan's empirical focus turned to girls. Making Connections, carried out with Nona Lyons and Trudy Hanmer at the Emma Willard School, and Meeting at the Crossroads, written with Lyn Mikel Brown, described a distinctive pattern in which girls enter adolescence with confidence and voiced perception, and then increasingly silence or edit themselves in order to stay in relationship. This "loss of voice" work fed directly into popular and educational debates about girls' self-esteem in the 1990s, and the wider Harvard Project on Women's Psychology that she helped found generated much of the evidence base for it.

Later work on patriarchy, resistance, and democracy

From The Birth of Pleasure (2002) onward, Gilligan recast the ethics of care in political terms, treating patriarchy as a psychological as well as a social order that requires the suppression of voice, empathy, and pleasure. With David A. J. Richards she wrote on patriarchy and democracy, and with Naomi Snider she wrote Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, framing resistance — including the everyday act of speaking in one's own voice — as the hinge between personal psychology and democratic life. Her 2023 volume In a Human Voice gathers four decades of this work.

Major Publications

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982)
Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education (1988; some sources give 1989), with Janie Victoria Ward, Jill McLean Taylor, and Betty Bardige
Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School (1990), with Nona P. Lyons and Trudy J. Hanmer
Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance (1991), with Annie Rogers and Deborah Tolman
Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (1992), with Lyn Mikel Brown
Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship (1995), with Jill McLean Taylor and Amy M. Sullivan
The Birth of Pleasure (2002)
Kyra (2008), a novel
Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, with Naomi Snider
In a Human Voice (2023)

Impact and Legacy

Few psychological books have crossed as many disciplinary borders as In a Different Voice. The ethics of care became a working framework in nursing and social work, a position in political philosophy and feminist legal theory, and a justification for pedagogical approaches centered on relationship rather than rule enforcement. Gilligan was named Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year in 1984, received the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 1992, was listed among Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans in 1996, received a Heinz Award in 1998, and took the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2025, whose citation praised her for envisioning an enmeshment of justice and care. Her work is also credited with a broader methodological lesson: that universal theories built on unrepresentative samples encode their omissions as findings.

The empirical case for gendered moral orientations has nonetheless held up poorly, and this is the most durable criticism. Lawrence Walker's review of moral-stage research found sex differences to be negligible and to shrink to nothing once education was controlled, and Jaffee and Hyde's 2000 meta-analysis of moral orientation — a fairer test of Gilligan's claim than stage scores, since it measures care versus justice directly — found only small differences, conventionally reported at roughly d = 0.28, with very large overlap between the sexes.

Gilligan's reply has been twofold. She distinguished orientation from stage, arguing that instruments designed to score a justice sequence cannot register care reasoning at all and therefore cannot refute it; and she insisted the different voice is a theme rather than a sex difference, so that a small average difference was never the claim. Kohlberg himself, and later his collaborators, replied that the two orientations were not rivals at all but simultaneous influences on judgment — a position Gilligan and her colleagues rejected in turn, arguing that even if both orientations are available, men gravitate toward justice and women toward care. Subsequent large cross-cultural research on moral concerns has continued to find that women weigh care-related considerations more heavily than men do, giving her thesis partial support.

A second line of criticism concerns method. Her early studies rested on small, largely white and middle-class samples, analyzed through unstructured interviews whose coding rested substantially on the interpreter. Christina Hoff Sommers argued that the samples were too small, the procedures too unsystematic, and that Gilligan had declined to make her raw data available to other researchers; other feminist psychologists judged the results intriguing but unsubstantiated. Gilligan and her students answered with the Listener's Guide and other efforts to formalize voice-sensitive reading, while noting that every stage-scoring system depends on interpretive rules of its own. Closely related is the essentialism charge — that framing care as women's moral language valorizes the self-sacrifice women were already expected to perform, and risks reinforcing the stereotypes it meant to unsettle. Gilligan's own answer was to relocate the cause from structure to power: women's apparent concentration at lower stages, she later argued, is a function of patriarchy, not a stage deficit. Her collaborations with Janie Victoria Ward and others extended the analysis to race and social position, partly to answer critics who read the original work as speaking only for privileged women.

Finally, the whole care-versus-justice debate has been overtaken by changes in moral psychology itself. Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist account holds that moral judgments typically arrive as fast intuitions with reasoning supplied afterward, which shifts attention away from the deliberative reasoning both Kohlberg and Gilligan measured. Defenders of care ethics argue the framework survives this turn better than its rival does, since relationships and responsiveness are plausibly features of intuitive moral systems as well as of deliberation, and recent work on a "psychology of care" has tried to rebuild the theory on that basis.

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References

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard University Press.