The most commonly cited Gilligan reference is her first major book --

Carol Gilligan. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1982


But I read her initial paper, "In a Different Voice: Women's Conceptions of Self and of Morality", which seems to have been published in a compendium of articles about "The Naming of Difference" (I'm still searching for the precise reference...don't you just love it when someone xeroxes an article without writing down the source?) and it was apparent that her main points were that, a)> conventional male researchers such as Kohlberg were constantly extrapolating data derived from male subjects to apply the results to females, were always running with unquestioned gendered assumptions about the meaning of any differences that were observed, etc., and that this constitutes bad research (and, of course, is sexist and often acts to harm women); and b)> in the specific case of moral cognition, it was entirely reasonable and possible to derive a different set of conclusions about young women's moral development if one ceased to do as Kohlberg had done.

I feel that to an extent the favorable response given to her research led her to stress the "different voice" model she had developed as a new "fact" about women rather than an example, and to marginalize her original focus, which was to take on the pattern of male bias in research. Then, later, Gilligan was maligned regarding the methodology and the questionable nature of her demonstration of the "different voice" pattern, but in light of the origins of her work I think this is unfair to her; I think the "different voice" thesis was originally mainly an example useful to make her larger point, which people missed. Perhaps it is true that she embraced the attention and favor and that therefore she is partly accountable for the shift in attention, but in general I don't feel her credentials as a researcher deserved the trashing she got from certain quarters.