The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach

TLDR: Gilligan translated this question into research by subjecting the abstraction of universal and discrete agency to comparative research into female behavior evaluated on its own terms and revealed women to be more concrete in their thinking and more attuned to "fairness" while men acted on abstract reasoning and "rules of justice" as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: justice. Women, by contrast, were believed to be at a lower stage because they were found to have a sense of agency still tied primarily to their social relationships and to make political and moral decisions based on context-specific principles based on these relationships rather than on the grounds of their own autonomous judgments. Students of gender studies know well just how busy social scientists have been kept by their efforts to come up with ever more sociological "alibis" for the question of why women did not act like men. Gilligan's response was to refuse the terms of the debate altogether. She thus did not develop yet another explanation for why women are "deviant." Instead, she turned the question on its head by asking what was wrong with the theory a theory whose central premises defines 50% of social beings as "abnormal." Gilligan translated this question into research by subjecting the abstraction of universal and discrete agency to comparative research into female behavior evaluated on its own terms The new research revealed women to be more "concrete" in their thinking and more attuned to "fairness" while men acted on "abstract reasoning" and "rules of justice." These research findings transformed female otherness into variation and difference but difference now freed from the normative de-