Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan (born November 28, 1936, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American developmental psychologist best known for her research into the moral development of girls and women.

Gilligan earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Swarthmore College (1958), a master’s degree in clinical psychology at Radcliffe College (1961), and a Ph.D. in social psychology at Harvard University (1964). She was a lecturer and tutor at the University of Chicago and at Harvard before joining Harvard’s Graduate School of Education as an assistant professor in 1971. She was promoted to associate professor in 1979 and full professor in 1986. She served as Patricia Albjerg Professor of Gender Studies at the School of Education from 1997 to 2002, when she was appointed University Professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University.

While teaching at Harvard, Gilligan worked with the renowned developmental psychologists Erik Erikson and Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan became interested in Kohlberg’s research on the moral development of children, which happened to use only boys as subjects. Gilligan decided to undertake similar research on girls, which she eventually published in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982). In that work, Gilligan argued that girls exhibit distinct patterns of moral development based on relationships and on feelings of care and responsibility for others. Her work soon inspired and informed a feminist-oriented movement in philosophical ethics known as the ethics of care. Her other publications include several coauthored books on moral development, psychotherapy, and race relations; The Birth of Pleasure (2002), on love; and numerous scholarly papers.