Find Mediators Near You:

Diversity, Bias, Gender, And Race In ADR: A Hard Fight To Level The Playing Field

As I was getting ready for the start of the mediation training I was teaching, one of the participants, just arrived, approached me to tell me to get him a cup of coffee. Despite my power suit and the flip chart markers in my hand, he had mistaken the lead trainer for a member of the support staff.

If you think that this is an isolated incident in the life of an ADR professional who happens to be a woman, think again. Challenge yourself by reading commercial mediator Victoria Pynchon’s gutsy series on gender, race, and diversity in the ADR profession:

“Negotiating Prejudice at U.C. San Diego”

“Negotiating Gender: Why So Few Women Neutrals?”

“Update on Gender Diversity in the Judiciary and in ADR”

Then do as Vickie suggests and take the awareness-raising tests at Project Implicit, an ongoing research project inquiring into the implicit biases that affect our judgment. What associations do you draw about identity, capability, and role?

                        author

Diane J. Levin

Diane Levin, J.D., is a mediator, dispute resolution trainer, negotiation coach, writer, and lawyer based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, who has instructed people from around the world in the art of talking it out. Since 1995 she has helped clients resolve disputes involving tort, employment, business, estate, family, and real property… MORE >

Featured Mediators

ad
View all

Read these next

Category

SCOTX Refuses to Reconsider Patent Company’s Request to Vacate Arbitrator’s $3 Million Legal Fees Award

Disputing Blog by Karl Bayer, Victoria VanBuren, and Holly HayesThe Supreme Court of Texas has once again declined to consider a company’s request to vacate an arbitrator’s award in a...

By Beth Graham
Category

Vulnerability for the WIN!

By Lydia Ray's Guided Mediation,  www.guidedmediationllc.com/blog Do you have moments where you know if you changed your tune or listened a little longer instead of reacting the situation might have...

By Lydia Ray
Category

Who’s Running the Show?

Kluwer Mediation BlogSomething is in the air at the moment. And it goes to the heart of what we mediators do. On the one hand, noted mediation thinkers such as...

By Bill Marsh
×