The inequality is striking

After significant efforts in the past twenty years to improve the number of women in the judiciary, now around one-third of the United States Supreme Court justices are women, as are 35% of the active judges currently sitting on the thirteen United States federal courts of appeal and 32% of active United States district (or trial) court judges. These numbers are encouraging, yet they have not stopped commentators stating that there is “still a long way to go”. The world of international arbitration, however, tells a very different story. The percentage of female arbitrators appointed to tribunals in concluded ICSID cases up to September 2014 was less than 6%. The current best estimate of the percentage of female arbitrators appointed to international commercial arbitration tribunals is also around 6%.