Gender Differences in Making Moral Decisions: The Ethics of Care Perspective in Pakistan

This research explored how an ethics of care is practised in a communitarian society in Karachi, Pakistan. To this end 24 participants were interviewed, 12 males and 12 females aged between 19 and 32 years. We used a culturally adapted version of The Ethics of Care Interview (ECI). This adapted measure focused on lived experiences of participants resulting in an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of interview transcripts to explore ethics of care among study participants. The themes that emerged during IPA included the negotiation between norms related to religion and culture, familism, and gender differences. These analyses confirm the link between gender and the ethics of care indicating that women share higher concerns for care, often demonstrating empathy and sacrifice. The results also show that men expect women to care for others and behave in self-sacrificial ways. The intersectional nature of our study shows that culture and not gender may ultimately explain the ethical considerations of men and women. This means that both men and women justified their ethical choices of care because they believed they had a responsibility to do so. This shows that care ethics are more strongly dictated by societal norms of collectivism.