Legislating for Equality

The laws of a country shape and change traditions and culture and can play an important role in advancing and ensuring gender equality.

But when we analyse different laws, how do we determine which laws are effective in advancing women’s rights and which are not; which ones work and which ones fail?

Through her research, UTS Law’s Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa has come up with a unique way to answer these questions with the help of data science.

In collaboration with Rapido Social and the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) at UTS, she developed an analytic tool called the Gender Legislative Index (GLI) to benchmark, score and rank laws on a scale from gender regressive to gender responsive.

It includes a set of international women’s rights standards that countries are required to meet, concrete benchmarks for particular areas of law, and a way to compare legislative progress across countries and over periods of time.

Dr Vijeyarasa piloted the GLI in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines to analyse areas of law including gender-based violence, labour, reproductive health, taxation and family law. 

The GLI is now available online and Dr Vijeyarasa has since the pilot now applied the GLI to over 130 laws:

We also want to extend our study to develop better evidence of the institutional and structural factors that may have helped bring about the enactment of gender-responsive laws as well as evaluate their success in delivering better outcomes for women.

Dr Vijeyarasa has used the GLI as a research tool to assess the legislative footprint of four women leaders, from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Indonesia, by looking at legislation enacted during their tenure. She has done the same with Julia Gillard's time as Australian Prime Minister, adding over 30 Australian laws to the dataset. 

This has helped us to better understand the difference women leaders make and link this to global advocacy for more equal representation of women among world leaders.

Bridging the north-south divide, Dr Vijeyarasa hopes the GLI will be scaled up to create a dataset that can profoundly improve women's lives in low, middle and high-income countries, including helping legislators produce new bills that play their part in correcting discrimination and advancing equality and women’s rights.

Through her work in developing the Gender Legislative Index and various other research contributions, Dr Vijeyarasa was recently named the 2021 Runner-Up of the Letten Prize, presented by the Letten Foundation and the Young Academy of Norway. This prize "recognises younger researchers' contributions to the fields of health, development, the environment and equality in all aspects of human life." The prize also aims to raise awareness of the way academic research can solve global human development problems. 

Further reading: 'Making the law work for women: standard-setting through a new Gender Legislative Index' Alternative Law Journal (2019) 44(4): 275-280 

'Can an online platform increase state accountability on women's rights?'