Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa. Photo Toby Burrows
Not all laws are created equal, but with the right tools, the legal system has the power to deliver better outcomes for women.
That’s the opinion of UTS legal scholar Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa, the creator of the Gender Legislative Index (GLI). This online, evidence-based methodology benchmarks and scores legislation based on its capacity to progress — or derail — the global fight for women’s rights.
The GLI is already driving changes to parliamentary process — in June 2022, it informed a successful motion for a Joint Sessional Gender Equality and Audit Committee in Tasmanian Parliament, the only committee solely dedicated to gender in any Parliament in Australia.
And this is just the beginning. If Associate Professor Vijeyarasa gets her way, the GLI will transform the legal landscape for women around the world.
Laying the foundations for gender-responsive laws
Built in partnership with researchers at UTS Rapido Social and the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre, the GLI aims to help legislators, activists and advocates to drive the development of more gender-responsive laws both within traditional areas of legislation and beyond.
“A lot of scholars in international women’s rights law focus on areas of legislation where we have been fighting for change for many years, like gender-based violence and women’s reproductive health,” Associate Professor Vijeyarasa says.
We also need to bring a gender perspective to other areas of legislation that are equally important for women
- Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa
The GLI emerged from an earlier project that examined whether female presidents made a difference on women’s lives through the law. This led to the creation of seven criteria for gender-responsive lawmaking, which are based on an analysis of the then 37 general recommendations developed by the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
This work pointed to the potential power of an index that can assess whether domestic legislation meets international standards and can compare laws across jurisdictions and across subject matter.
“I wanted a tool to allow me to systematically go through legislation and not just say, OK, this law exists, but to understand, is it a good law?” says Associate Professor Vijeyarasa.
“Because it's one thing to have a law, but it’s another thing to have a law that has the prospect of making women's lives better.”
Here’s how the Gender Legislative Index works
The GLI works like this: human evaluators assess the individual provisions of a piece of legislation against the seven benchmarks for gender-responsive lawmaking, categorising the provisions as either gender regressive, blind, neutral, responsive or inconclusive.
These laws come from one of seven areas of legislation that hold particular significance for women’s rights: extractives industry law, family law, financial services law, gender-based violence law, labour law, reproductive health law, and taxation law.
The evaluators make a series of subject-specific evaluations and then provide an overall score to reflect the extent to which the law meets international standards for women’s rights.
From there, the GLI uses a machine learning algorithm based on a decision tree to provide a final overall score. The algorithm compares the human evaluators’ assessments of that particular law to all evaluated laws in the index, regardless of their country of origin or legislative category – a process that removes some of the potential for human bias.
“The AI reduces bias by aggregating all answers – and not just answers from ‘like’ or similar subject matter – to produce a result,” says Associate Professor Vijeyarasa, who won the 2022 Australian and New Zealand Woman in AI (Law) award for her work.
Transforming the foundations of the law
To date, Associate Professor Vijeyarasa has used the GLI to evaluate 134 laws across four countries. She’s now working to make the tool publicly available so that it can help lawmakers, advocates and activists around the world better understand and argue for more gender-responsive laws.
And those in power are taking notice, including Tasmanian MP Ruth Forrest MLC. Ms Forrest identified the potential utility of the GLI when she put forward her successful motion for the Joint Sessional Gender Equality and Audit Committee, which was established in late 2022.
“It is certainly a tool that the Government could adopt and apply. It would be very useful,” she said during the motion.
“Australian laws should not be gender-neutral where there are important differences between men and women that need to be taken into account.”
But Australia is just the first stop in what Associate Professor Vijeyarasa hopes will become a global shift towards more gender-responsive lawmaking. She has also presented to the Gender Mainstreaming Unit of the OECD and is seeking further opportunities to meet with CEDAW and the World Bank in the months to come.
