A corporate shareholder challenging a California law requiring corporations to include women on their boards of directors faced tough questioning Wednesday from a federal appeals court panel.

Creighton Meland Jr., a retired banking and finance partner who’d worked in Baker McKenzie’s Chicago office, has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn a 2020 trial court order dismissing his lawsuit. He brought the complaint as a shareholder of Hawthorne-based OSI Systems Inc.