In A Different Voice

In a Different Voice is a 1982 text on gender studies by American professor Carol Gilligan.

Harvard University Press described this text as “the little book that started a revolution”. In it, Gilligan criticized Kohlberg's stages of moral development of children: Kohlberg had argued that girls on average reached a lower level of moral development than boys did. Gilligan noted that the participants in Kohlberg's basic study were largely male. She also stated that the scoring method Kohlberg used tended to favor a principled way of reasoning (one more common to boys) over a moral argumentation concentrating on relations, which would be more amenable to girls.

Some have critiqued the work. Christina Hoff Sommers argues in The War Against Boys that "Gilligan has failed to produce the data for her research". Gilligan argued in response that "her findings have been published in leading journals and that Sommers' points are not accurate". In her article "Power, Resistance and Science", Naomi Weisstein makes a general argument against what she describes as "feminist psychologists" who "put forth a notion of female difference which, while no longer biologically based, is nevertheless essentialist, or at least highly decontextualized, for example, Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982); Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (1990). That is, they assume that female difference is fixed, rather than contingent on social context."