Gilda Turitz quoted in article on women in ADR, “Taking a seat at the table: Women neutrals underrepresented in some fields”.
Helping women mediators build their reputations has been a major part of the work of the ABA’s Committee on Women in Dispute Resolution. Gilda Turitz, a San Francisco-based neutral who previously chaired the committee, said she’s made personal efforts to bolster her reputation so that she could get more work in the ADR field.
Transferring those efforts to the WIDR Committee, Turitz said the organization developed a membership directory. A common refrain in the ADR world has been, “I don’t know of any women mediators,” so the directory was created to help parties identify women neutrals in specific fields, she said.
Further, Turitz said the committee has worked to help women mediators find more speaking engagements or writing opportunities. In her experience, agreeing to a speaking engagement helped Turitz get her name on a national panel of neutrals.
“You can’t go up to someone and say, ‘For your next case, hire me as your arbitrator,’ because then you’re no longer a neutral,” Turitz said. “What I did was heighten my profile … so that when people do a Google search, my name bubbles up.”
