Gender and Moral Development

Narrow Morality Why do some people recognize a higher moral law, while others are simply content to obey rules without question?

Moral Dilemmas: Heinz

Who cares about my stage?!  Your stage matters!  Problem-solving changes in your 20s-30s  Specific educational attempts to influence awareness  Behavior is influenced by moral perception and moral judgments  Kohlberg cared…

Carefully collected international data  Aboriginal villages in Malaysia  Turkey  Yucatán  Urban areas in the US and Mexico

Carol Gilligan

Women & Kohlberg  Women often scored a full stage below their male counterparts  Women focused on SOLUTIONS THAT PRESERVED CONNECTIONS

What’s going on?  Either women are less morally developed than men OR  Something is wrong with Kohlberg’s framework

Women and their moral dilemmas

In a Different VOICE  Harmony without sameness  Collaborative (not competitive/combative)  Voices are different without excluding one another  A wide vocabulary that has NOTHING to do with right/wrong or true/false

Men’s View of the Self  Autonomy  Freedom  Independence  Separateness  Hierarchy  Rules guide interactions  Roles establish place in hierarchy

Women’s View of the Self  Relatedness  Interdependence  Emotional Connectedness  Responsiveness to needs of others  Web of relationships  Empathy & connectedness guide interactions  Roles are secondary to connections

Men’s Moral Voices  Justice  Rights  Treating everyone fair/the same  Apply rules impartially to everyone  Responsibility towards abstract codes of conduct

Women’s Moral Voices  Care  Responsibility  Caring about everyone's suffering  Preserve emotional connectedness  Responsibility toward real individuals

Stages of Women’s Moral Development

Umm…who cares?  Different ideas about what to do about these gender-based ways of making decisions

Separate but equal  Men and women have different but equally valuable moral voices  Reinforces stereotypes  Hard to retain “…but equal” part  We have nothing to learn from one another  Devalues those with “non-traditional” moral voices

Superiority Thesis  Women’s moral voices are superior  Exclusionary  Demands that someone be the loser  Inverts traditional claims of male “superiority”

Integrationist Thesis  There is only one moral voice: It’s the same for men and women  No richness or diversity  Assimilationist-everybody needs to fall in line with the powerful majority

Diversity Thesis  There are different moral voices and this is a source of richness and diversity  External: Different sex-based moral voices  Internal: We all have masculine AND feminine moral voices within us Minimizes gender stereotyping

Bem’s Sex Roles

How does all of this carry over to leadership?  3 male + 3 female leaders  What industry?  Adjectives to describe them as an individual  Adjectives to describe their moral voice  What you think it’s like to work for them?

Leadership Preferences?

Sam Palmisano: CEO IBM

Where are we headed? “We need not just a new generation of leadership but a new gender of leadership.” -Bill Clinton Acknowledgement that BOTH male and female voices and leadership styles are necessary for a successful organization!

Next Class  Tokenism & the pay gap