Transformative Women, Problem-Solving Men? Not Quite: Gender and Mediators' Perceptions of Mediation

Noa Nelson, Adi Zarankin, Rachel Ben-Ari

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

A large field study examined female and male mediators' perceptions of their jobs, looking in particular at their attitudes toward mediation styles lying on the continuum between instrumental and transformative. Based on scholarship on gender and negotiation literature that has portrayed women as more interpersonal and somewhat less task oriented than men, we expected female mediators to be more transformative and less instrumental in their practice than their male peers.Our study was both qualitative and quantitative: we formulated the content of twenty in-depth interviews into an extensive questionnaire, answered by a representative sample of 189 Israeli mediators. Compared with their male counterparts, we found female mediators to be more transformative, but no less instrumental, in their view of mediation's goals and orientation. They were also somewhat more facilitative in preferred style, while male mediators were somewhat more directive. We also found additional intriguing gender differences, including that women mediators reported higher job satisfaction than did male mediators, but they also displayed a greater readiness to perceive failure in mediation.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)287-308
Number of pages22
JournalNegotiation Journal
Volume26
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2010

Keywords

  • Mediation
  • Mediator gender
  • Transformative versus instrumental mediation

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