Fairness, understanding, and satisfaction: Impact of mediator and participant race and gender on participants' perception of mediation

This empirical study explores the effects of matching mediators and mediation participants by gender and by racial or ethnic identity group. It considers both the effect on a participant of being present in a mediation session where there is no mediator of the same gender or racial/ethnic group and the effect of being present when there is also a mediator who matches the gender or race/ethnicity of the other participant. The results show that failing to match disputants and mediators by gender has negative effects on mediation satisfaction measures and that those effects increase when the mediator's gender also matches that of the other participant. In contrast, failure to match by racial or ethnic group has little effect, but when an unmatched participant faces both an opposing participant and a mediator who share a racial or ethnic identification, mediation satisfaction decreases in several respects.