Equality before the law

The perception is that justice is blind and the law applies equally to everyone, but according to University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa, a lot of discrimination that women face is embedded in the law.

That might be in the form of a law that benefits two-parent households over single-parent households, which tend to be single mothers. Or a law that embeds inequality such as paid parental leave schemes that define mothers as the primary carer, which makes it harder for parents in same-sex or different-sex couples to equally share care.

“During my time as an international human rights lawyer, I met many women from all regions of the world and learned that whether you’re a Brazilian woman living in a slum, a farmer in Liberia or you live in the floating villages of Cambodia, the law rarely works the way it’s meant to,” Vijeyarasa says.

“A major part of the problem is that we either unintentionally embed discrimination in our laws, or we fail to see how laws can be better used to advance the interests of a greater diversity of women.”

Determined to address these flaws, Vijeyarasa made it her mission to provide the legal system with tools it can use to deliver better outcomes for women – and progress the global fight for women’s rights in the process.

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Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa. Image: Ansh Bose

Vijeyarasa joined UTS as a Chancellor’s post-doctoral research fellow in 2017 after a long career as a women’s rights advocate with local and international nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). She has been a passionate advocate for gender equality and human rights her whole life, and over the course of her career she has lent her expertise and experience to efforts that address these issues.

Soon after joining the university, Vijeyarasa began researching the impact female heads of state make on women’s lives through the law, which helped her develop seven criteria for gender-responsive lawmaking (see below). These criteria are based on the 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 legislation meets international standards. She knew any index would also need to benchmark and compare laws across jurisdictions and 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,” Vijeyarasa says.

“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.”

What makes a law good for women - 7 criteria

Does the law guarantee access to non-discriminatory and accessible, affordable, acceptable services?
Does the law guarantee access to information and education, or provision of information and education on the issue?
Does the law guarantee non-coerced and informed decision-making, and protect confidentiality?
Does the law promote equal relations between men and women?
Does the law protect women from situations of vulnerability linked to their gender?
Does the law guarantee accessible and effective remedies?
Does the law promote the comprehensive monitoring of the situation of women?

Setting global benchmarks

This idea grew into the Gender Legislative Index, a tool that can be used to benchmark laws for how well they contribute to gender equality.

“I wanted to create an index that would help activists on the ground push for reforms to laws in ways that address inequality suffered by women,” she says.

“I needed it to be not just a methodologically sound piece of research, but also a database that was user-friendly and, frankly, appealing.”

Although Vijeyarasa didn’t know exactly how to start, she knew the solution would need to be cross-disciplinary and collaborative to succeed. After “knocking on the wrong doors”, she landed on a solution that would combine her knowledge and expertise in the fields of international law and women’s rights with machine learning, software engineering and data science. Rapido Social Impact, an R&D innovation hub within the UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT, and the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre, which specialises in analytics and data visualisation, helped Vijeyarasa develop and launch the first prototype of the Gender Legislative Index in 2019.

Grant money from social impact funds allowed her to test the tool by reviewing more than 30 Australian laws and use the outcomes to further refine and develop the prototype. The Gender Legislative Index was made public in its current form in 2021. To date, it’s analysed and benchmarked more than 134 laws in four countries.

“Simply speaking, it’s about using data to understand whether laws are effectively helping women, and to visualise how to draft better laws that work more effectively to advance women’s rights,” she says.

There’s a huge amount of data powering the index, but its blend of human evaluation and AI assessment makes it unique. Evaluators assess individual laws against the seven criteria and rank it as being gender regressive, blind, neutral or responsive. Then, the index uses machine learning to provide a final overall score on a scale of ‘complete disregard for international law’ to ‘meeting international standards’. The algorithm compares the human evaluators’ assessments of that particular law to all evaluated laws in the index – a process that removes some potential for human bias.

This two-part system allows the index to combine meaningful aggregation of the different parts of each law’s evaluation, while also giving users an overall score to facilitate comparisons across laws and countries.

“I needed to process the data in a way that could give users a quick snapshot without losing the richness underneath,” Vijeyarasa says.

“Thanks to an AI-driven algorithm, the index gives an overarching score for a law, reducing much of the bias that humans bring to their evaluation of laws. All laws, irrespective of area, are treated similarly.”

Gender Legislative Index

A series of images representing each of the scores on the Gender Legislative Index. These include: Complete disregard for international standards, Not meeting international standards, Partially meeting international standards, Mostly meeting international standards, Meeting international standards.

Ramona presenting in front of a white background

What is the Gender Legislative Index?

(00:03:45)

Wielding the law as a tool for good

Already the index is driving change. Tasmania used the tool to establish Australia’s first ever parliamentary Gender and Equality Audit Committee, which is currently auditing draft legislation to ensure gender responsiveness. Vijeyarasa hopes this is just the beginning.

“Gender equality is one of the greatest challenges that we face in the world right now,” she says.

“If we don’t address it, it will exacerbate but also be made worse by other challenges like climate change and global conflict.”

Vijeyarasa is also shaping the next generation of legal professionals to think more broadly about the law as a channel for progress. She took the reins of the UTS Faculty of Law’s Juris Doctor program in 2022, where she has worked to embed social justice into the curriculum.

“The idea of the law as a tool for social justice is a shared value across the faculty and within the Juris Doctor,” she says.

“Issues of injustice impact people from every life path. We’re really conscious of the need to bring this gendered and intersectional lens to our research and teaching.”

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