Do women make better mediators? Lucy Chakaodza reports
What makes a good mediator—personality, age, a background in the legal sector or a person’s gender? Can gender affect mediation - do innate characteristics provide an advantage for a female mediator?
The increased need for more
diversity in the workplace, professional bodies and in institutions, means that women still face certain hurdles and disadvantages in getting to the top of their chosen career. Is there any evidence to suggest that like within other areas of industry which is largely male dominated, there is an unfair bias in how people perceive female and male mediators?
Existing studies such as “Men and women as mediators: disputant perceptions” (2008) by Alice F Stuhlmacher and Melissa G Morrissett, have shown that male mediators
are perceived more favourably than their female counterparts and that there is an unconscious bias in people’s minds in how females are viewed. Although this may be true in some cases there is no definitive research to validate this claim.
In Kathy Perkins’s LLC, 2010 paper—“Gender in mediation: negotiation and the gender divide”, she
