The Expert Witness Institute has committed its support as an organisation for the recently launched Equal Representation for Expert Witnesses (ERE) Pledge.
The ERE Pledge seeks to drive, on an equal opportunity basis, an increase in the number of women appointed as expert witnesses in dispute resolution procedures worldwide. ERE’s objective is to achieve a fair representation as soon as practically possible, with the ultimate goal of full parity.
Discussing the Pledge’s raison d’être, Co-Founder and AlixPartners Managing Director Kathryn Britten commented:
“Having acted as an expert witness in major commercial disputes for almost 30 years, I have been consistently shocked by how few women have been appointed as my opposing experts – yet I have consistently seen very capable women producing excellent work as ‘Number 2’. We need to do something to ensure that talented women have the opportunity to act as expert witnesses in their own right.”
Co-Founder and AlixPartners Managing Director Isabel Kunsman added:
“As an expert witness, I am acutely aware of the need to do more in my own profession. There are many impressive women working in this field but the higher up the ranks you go, the lower the number of women you see, particularly among testifying expert witnesses.”
In 2020, curious to assess the landscape and attribute some hard figures to this particular issue, Kathryn and Isabel, through AlixPartners, commissioned a survey. From the results, they discovered that 56% of arbitrators and lawyers had seen no women in expert roles in the last three years, while only 1% had seen four or more women in expert roles in the same period.
Analysis of ICSID awards from 2016 to 2020 also showed that, out of 75 awards, only 3% included female experts. This was even lower than the PwC/Queen Mary Survey published in 2020, which showed that 11% of the 180 awards in arbitral proceedings administered by the ICC in Paris and New York between 2014 and 2018 included female experts.
While this all made for disappointing reading, in sharing the results Kathryn and Isabel have been encouraged by the response from members of the dispute resolution community worldwide, who have offered their support to improve the representation of women experts from now on.
Over the last nine months, the Co-Founders have engaged with various members of the international arbitration and litigation communities to discuss an initiative to address the scarcity of female expert witnesses. As part of the initiative, they worked with other experts, lawyers and interested parties, to create the ERE pledge – as a sister to the Equal Representation in Arbitration (ERA) Pledge – to drive a commitment to create equal opportunities for female expert witnesses in all areas of dispute resolution.
Their efforts to engage the legal and expert witness communities have paid off and they have achieved significant milestones to date, firstly in launching the Pledge itself on a new website, and secondly in the creation of a Steering Committee for ERE to promote the Pledge, gather advice and perspectives, and implement additional ideas to address the scarcity of female expert witnesses. The Pledge has recently passed the 200 individual signatures mark, with more than 40 organisations, including EWI, also committing to the ERE Pledge.
Isabel commented: “We are ensuring that the Steering Committee features members from across the consulting firms active in the litigation and arbitration space, and we now have representatives from many leading consultancies and accounting firms.”
Kathryn added: “We are both thrilled that senior members from the Expert Witness Institute have agreed to join the Global Steering Committee – they will bring another vital perspective and insight to the challenges faced by female expert witnesses across a broad range of professional industries.”
The Co-Founders strongly believe that for ERE to succeed it must be nurtured across firms, generations, and geographies.
In summary, the goals of the ERE Pledge are to:
- increase, on an equal opportunity basis, the number of women appearing as experts, in order to achieve proportional representation and eventually full parity;
- support hiring, mentoring, and promotion of female experts;
- create a coalition of supporters and advocates in the world of dispute resolution;
- encourage women to aspire to be expert witnesses in their chosen professions;
- widen the pool of expert witnesses available and help to enhance the reputation of expert witnesses.
Read the commentary to the Pledge.
Take the Pledge.
And finally, a message from the ERE team – please contact us with your ideas and/or questions regarding the ERE Pledge.