The Debate Continues: Are There Gender Differences in Moral Reasoning as Defined by Kohlberg?

A cross-sectional study of 244 first-year and graduating students was conducted to examine the change in moral reasoning during college and to determine whether there are gender differences in this process. Women scored higher than men on both Principled moral reasoning and Davison's moral index and graduating students scored higher than first year students on Davison's moral index, as measured by the Defining Issues Test. These findings are discussed in light of the debate about whether Kohlberg's theory adequately describes women's development of moral reasoning. One of the goals of higher education has always been the development of and character among students. For instance, the Moral Society of Yale College, from the 1790's to the 1860's, required its members to live according to the Bible, to suppress vice and promote the interests of morality (Rudolph, 1962, p. 78). Despite this emphasis on morality, theories that describe how students develop the ability to think complexly about moral issues were not developed until the twentieth century. Kohlberg's (1966, 1968, 1984) theory has been particularly useful to academicians and student affairs practitioners because it describes the stages students go through to develop complex ways of thinking about moral issues (Rogers, 1980). Despite overwhelming interest in Kohlberg's (1984) theory, it has been criticized for being biased against women. The concern about this issue began with Gilligan's (1979; 1982) assertion that women scored lower on Kohlberg's measures of moral development than men and were therefore considered to be deficient in moral reasoning. Her research revealed that men and women had different ways of thinking about moral issues - men used the justice-oriented reasoning described by Kohlberg and women used a form of reasoning based on care and relationships. She proposed that Kohlberg's theory did not adequately describe women's moral development because it devalued the care voice. Furthermore, she argued that psychological theories that are based solely on a male model fail to take into account the different developmental experiences of women and that women's development of the care voice should be valued just as highly as the development of the justice voice. Since Gilligan's work was published, numerous authors and researchers have debated the issue of gender differences in moral development and whether Kohlberg's theory is gender biased. This study was a further examination of that question. Theoretical Background Kohlberg's Theory. Building on the work of Piaget (1948, 1954), Kohlberg (1966, 1968, 1984) developed a theory that describes cognitive-structural stages of moral reasoning. Piaget described cognitive-structures as modes of thought that have an underlying organization. He thought that each stage in a cognitive-structural model was qualitatively different from the other stages because the underlying organization was different. He also proposed that cognitive-structural stages occur in an invariant sequence and are hierarchical, meaning that each stage builds on and incorporates previous stages. In this type of model, higher stages represent more complex reasoning and are more adaptive than lower stages. Kohlberg's theory utilizes Piaget's concepts and describes how individuals think about moral issues at different cognitive-structural stages. It is based on a justice-- orientation, the belief that people will resolve a moral dilemma by weighing the rights of competing parties and making a decision about what is just and fair. His theory also emphasizes that moral development results from social interaction, environmental quality, and opportunities to become aware of others' thoughts and feelings. Kohlberg's (1984) theory measures deontic reasoning, how one thinks about what should be done in a hypothetical situation. The classic way of measuring the stages in the theory is to present a hypothetical dilemma in an interview or written format and ask the respondent to decide what the character should do in the dilemma and provide a rationale for the decision. …