Cognitive difference between males and females in morality
The fact that females and males have in the past, and continue to be treated heterogeneously in society is common knowledge. In the last decade there has been a massive shift in perspective and as more and more women started to speak up for themselves and gender inequalities, i.e., wealth gap, education gap, are becoming more apparent and acknowledged.
For instance, the gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked by the Global Gender Gap Report 2021 (World Economic Forum, 2021). Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 parliament seats and just 22.6% of over 3,400 ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a female head of state, as of 15th January 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics (World Economic Forum, 2021).
The question is naturally raised, why males and females are culturally perceived so differently? Is it possible that the variety of global gender gaps is actually given by a biological cognitive difference between males and females?
This paper investigates whether or not males and females have biological differences that imply different cognitive and moral behavior. The two main hypotheses are:
Biological sex does not influence moral style nor moral choice. There is no difference in the demographic characteristics influence moral choice for males and females. The expectation is not to find any noteworthy discrepancy in the moral and cognitive behavior of the two sexes. If there are differences, they may be traced back to the gender rather than the sex, which entails a biological difference. The possible variances given by the different gender; hence a social construct (Aartsen, Martin & Zimprich, 2003), is not studied in the present paper, nor the distinct cultural clusters (Luft, 2020).