Men and women often have difficulties communicating (duh!). Some of these difficulties arise from differences in the way men and women think. Intellectual and ethical development in adults has been studied by Perry, Belenky, and others.
After studying male Harvard University undergraduates aged 17 to 22 years, Perry (1968) proposed that intellectual and ethical development continue into adulthood. The developmental sequence consists of nine positions, occurring in three broad categories:
Dualism (“Things are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong.”)
Relativism (“All positions are equally right depending upon the situation.”)
Commitment (“I have come to new beliefs from available evidence, experiences, and my own values.”)
Belenky et al. (1986) discovered five general intellectual and ethical perspectives taken by their female subjects, with less-clear progression of stages. The categories by which women come to understand the world are:
Silence (Passive and dependent, women in this category feel “deaf and dumb”.)
Received Knowledge (Women in this category learn by listening, with absolute truths coming from typically male authority figures.)
Subjective Knowledge (Subjectivists trust their “gut” because the male authority figure has let them down. This could be viewed as “women’s intuition”.)
Procedural Knowledge (After both authority and their own “gut” have failed them, the focus turns to form over content. It’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters!)
Constructed Knowledge (Integration of subjective and procedural ways of knowing produce the perspective where “all knowledge is constructed, and the knower is an intimate part of the known”.)
After considering the research findings from Perry (1968) and Belenky et al. (1986), respond to the following questions for a total minimum word count of 500 words. Submit the questions and responses as a MS Word (.docx) file or a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file for this assignment.
What are the differences in male versus female cognition, according to conceptualizations by Perry (for men) and Belenky (for women)? Are there parallels?
Developmentally speaking, where might these differences come from?
What are some of the difficulties posed by these gender differences in establishing and maintaining adult relationships?
Research Articles:
Perry, W. (1968) Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson.
Belenky, M.F., Clinchy, B.M., Goldberger, N.R., and Tarule, J.M. (1986) Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books. http://www.colorado.edu/UCB/AcademicAffairs/ftep/publications/documents/WomensWaysofKnowing.pdf
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