Rethinking women's ways of knowing: Gender commonalities and intersections with postformal thought

Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) identified five ways of knowing in women: silent, received, subjective, procedural, and constructed. This study examined the extent to which they were used by both women and men and their intersection with postformal, relativistic thought (Sinnott, 1989b). As listed, the ways of knowing fall along a continuum of increasingly complex thought; hence, overlap between constructed knowing and relativistic thought was expected. Thirty female and 30 male university students (aged 27 to 43 years) completed a structured interview about ways of knowing, solved two hypothetical everyday problems, and completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Age predicted neither ways of knowing nor relativistic thought; increasing education was predictive of relativistic thought but not constructed knowing. Neither women nor men relied on received knowing; women used subjective knowing more than men did, while the opposite was true for procedural knowing. While there were no gender differences in relativistic thought or constructed knowing, femininity was associated positively with both. Finally, procedural knowing decreased while constructed knowing increased with increasing evidence of relativistic thought.