Gilligan 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.

[2] Unlike the work which led her to her own studies, Gilligan's In a Different Voice purports to take account of both men and women.

"[4] Gilligan found three stages to maturity when studying twenty-nine women from referrals of abortion and pregnancy-counseling centers.

In this stage, women tend to take control of their lives and realizing the seriousness of a situation, especially if there happened to be a chance to involve someone getting hurt.

Em Griffin asserts that Gilligan's theory of "moral development [claims] that women tend to think and speak in a different way than men when they confront ethical dilemmas.

Rooted in a respect for the legal system,[5] it applies in the Western democracy ideas like social contract theory to everyday moral decisions.

It pushes the debate forward, yet it is limited by the terms set by men who had no grasp of the worlds that flourished in their own kitchens and nurseries.

Gilligan argued in response that, "her findings have been published in leading journals and that Sommers' points are not accurate," even though access to the raw data has been consistently denied to other researchers.

[9] 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).