As reported here earlier, in January 2016, the ICC Court announced that it would start to publish the names of arbitrators serving in ICC administered cases.
When the first six names and the corresponding information were released in June 2016, the snapshot of arbitrator appointment at the time was surprisingly young, and surprisingly female: At that point in time, six sole arbitrators had been appointed, three of them were women. Looking at the biographies on the website of the arbitrators, the majority – both male and female – of them struck me as young (at least by the standards of the arbitration community, and using graduation and bar admittance dates as proxies for age).
It certainly was not a result I had expected. On the other hand, it was hardly a surprise that the first cases all featured sole arbitrators. Almost by definition, the appointment process for a sole arbitrator must be faster than in the case of a three member tribunal.
From a statistical point of view, that first set of cases clearly was not a robust representation of any trends. I rather arbitrarily decided to do some number crunching, once the threshold of 50 arbitrators has been exceeded. This is now the case: As of today, data is available for 30 ICC arbitration proceedings and 54 arbitrators. My analysis has been published today over at the Kluwer Arbitration Blog. I looked at who appointed whom, at arbitrator nationalities and backgrounds, and of course at the share of women arbitrators – check it out!