Carol Gilligan has critiqued Kohlberg’s theory of moral development :

A feminist critique in developmental psychology asks whether a theory's evidence base and value hierarchy represent women's experience, or instead treat male-derived norms as the universal standard for maturity — specifically, whether justice-oriented reasoning was set as the developmental endpoint while relational, care-oriented reasoning was scored as less mature.

Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) makes exactly this argument against Lawrence Kohlberg's stage theory. Kohlberg's original longitudinal sample consisted only of boys, and his highest stage rewarded abstract, justice-based reasoning. When women's responses — organised around care, relationships, and responsibility — were scored against that same scale, they clustered at lower stages. Gilligan argued this reflected a male-centred bias in the theory's sample and values rather than any real developmental deficit in women, and she proposed a parallel ethic of care alongside Kohlberg's ethic of justice. That is precisely a feminist perspective on Kohlberg's theory — it targets the gender bias built into the theory's foundations.

Checking against the other options confirms this:

• from a social cognitive perspective — describes theories built on observational learning and modelling, such as Bandura's work, which is not the basis of Gilligan's argument.

• for not giving adequate importance to genetic factors — Gilligan's objection is not about nature versus nurture or biological inheritance; it concerns whose moral voice the stages were built around.

• for using case study as the research method — Kohlberg's stages came from longitudinal, dilemma-based interviews, not case studies, and Gilligan's critique targets gender representation and values, not this methodological choice.

The critique is therefore feminist in nature — it is about gender bias in the theory's sample and values, not about learning style, genetics, or research method.