Are Women More Ethical? Recent Findings on the Effects of Gender Upon Moral Development

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of gender upon moral development. Prior moral development research on the gender difference is substantial but ambiguous, but little research has examined public-sector employees. This study compares the moral development of 299 male and female members of the U.S. Coast Guard. The study uses Kohlberg's moral development framework to operationalize levels of moral judgment, and it employs Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT) as a measurement instrument. The study found that Coast Guard women scored 4.5 points higher than males scored on the DIT, a statistically significant difference. The essay discusses criticisms of Kohlberg, including Gilligan's argument that Kohlberg ignores the female perspective. Implications for public-sector ethics are discussed and a path for future research is offered. Are women more ethical than men? Over the last twenty years, this controversial and flagrant question has been asked more and more by social scientists and ethicists. Since the advent of modern moral development theory, researchers have developed and fine tuned empirical methods for examining individual levels of moral judgment and ethical behavior. With such tools in hand, they identify variables that may affect moral development. For example, researchers determine that age, education, and life experience are primary determinants of moral development and ultimately ethical behavior (Rest 1986 and 1993). Gender as a determinant of moral development has been studied extensively, but with arguable and less conclusive results.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 82 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.