Expert witnesses: where are all the women?
Expert witnesses are used in complex legal disputes to help explain a technical topic to a judge or arbitrator — and can hail from fields as varied as medicine, law, and accountancy.
A chemist, for example, may be called to testify in a complex drug patent dispute; or an accountancy expert to testify about potential losses suffered by a company after a fraud has been discovered. In each case, the expert witness’s overriding duty is to the court, and they must provide truthful, impartial and independent opinions.
But a disproportionately small number of these experts are female — which has led to the launch of an initiative to increase the number of women acting as expert witnesses in court cases and arbitrations.
The new campaign complements an existing push to improve the underrepresentation of female arbitrators, which has seen some success.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Jane Croft
