University of Manchester academic wins Sociology SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence

Dr Leah Gilman

Dr Leah Gilman was awarded last week the Sociology SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence for her paper ‘The Selfish Element: How Sperm and Egg Donors Construct Plausibly Moral Accounts of the Decision to Donate’. The prize is awarded to the paper published in the previous year’s Sociology Journal’s volume judged to represent innovation or excellence in the field.

Leah Gilman is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy (CSEP) in the School of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on social, cultural and legal perspectives on reproduction, childhood, personal relationships and medicine.

In this article, Leah Gilman analyses how sperm and egg donors talk about their motivations to donate. She is specifically interested in cases where donors choose to reject assumptions that they are motivated only by a desire to ‘do good’ and instead describe acting, at least partly, for the ‘wrong reason’.

“Contemporary donors in the UK usually talk about donating in order to help others. However, in this paper I offer a sociological explanation for why donors often also describe a ‘selfish element’ to their motives. Why would donors (and people in general) admit to doing something good but for the wrong reasons?” Dr Leah Gilman.

Leah’s findings reveal that donors might choose to explain their donation with a ‘wrong reason’ as a means to offer an account of their actions that is ‘plausibly moral’. In a neoliberal secular context where the possibility of pure altruism towards strangers is often met with cynicism, explaining our actions using ‘wrong reasons’ as well as ‘right’ ones, allows people to offer an account that will be believed by others and which also feels authentic.

The article was based on data produced as part of a wider research project: ‘Curious Connections’, led by Dr Petra Nordqvist and investigating the impact of donation in UK egg and sperm donors in the context of increased openness in donor conception practices.

Dr Gilman is currently continuing her work focusing on sperm and egg donation and is involved in a project led by Dr Lucy Frith: ‘Direct-to-consumer genetic testing and donor conception’. The project explores the social, ethical, legal and psychological implications of online DNA testing for people involved in donor conception.