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For me, the difficulty with these appointments comes much earlier in the system. To be a barrister, you need to be able to fund yourself in the early years which seems inevitably to mean that kids from wealthy backgrounds are more likely to be able to enter the profession in the first place. Then there is the evidence that women are still shunted into family, or feel more responsibility for their own families so may not go as far. Then, there is the fact that you are more likely to get a pupillage if you went to a toff school with a network of old boys whom you can contact to get a foot in the door. The pool is narrowed down very early on, so to say that the one criterion should be that the candidate is "the best", is naive. The (potentially) best may never get to enter the profession at all. Until more is done to even out the playing field further down, the best will inevitably be drawn from a tiny, unrepresentative pool of (largely) white men with family money behind them.