About the Event
The law has been the target of staunch criticisms from feminist scholars, with both legislators and parliament critiqued as weak actors and inhospitable fora when it comes to accounting for women’s interests. By contrast, this presentation argues that law is a fundamental instrument to advance and achieve gender justice. The presentation begins with an introduction to the Gender Legislative Index (GLI), a tool that uses human evaluators and machine-learning to measure the gender-responsiveness of legislation against international norms. It then explores examples of laws evaluated using the GLI from three jurisdictions that reflect how such evaluations against international principles bring to life three key feminist principles: a) identifying blindness of law to gendered interests; b) challenging women’s marginalisation in international law; c) and an expansion of the purview of what counts as “good-practice” legislation to include the global South. The presentation concludes with a discussion about legislative scrutiny and an insight into a new evolution in the project that will examine the effectiveness of parliamentary gender audit committees that assess legislation for gendered impacts.
Recommended Readings (not a pre-requisite to attend):
Ramona Vijeyarasa, Quantifying CEDAW: Concrete tools for enhancing accountability for women’s human rights, Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 34 (2021), pp. 37-80. See here
Ramona Vijeyarasa, Comparing Whose Laws? Interrogating Biases in Comparative Law and Scholarship Through the Lens of Domestic Violence Workplace Leave, International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 40(2) (2024), pp. 249-274. See here
Ramona Vijeyarasa, Making the law work for women: Standard-setting through a new Gender Legislative Index, Alternative Law Journal, 44(4) (2019), pp. 275-280. See here
The event will be hybrid – if you cannot join us in person for the cookies and tea/coffee, here are the details to join via Teams:
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Meeting ID: 338 504 742 372
Passcode: hJ5iaV
About the Speaker
Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa, Associate Professor and Director of the Juris Doctor Program in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, is a scholar, advocate and practitioner of international women’s rights law. She is the architect behind the Gender Legislative Index (GLI), an online tool that uses human evaluators and machine learning to assess whether domestic laws meet global women’s rights standards; the author of three monographs on gender issues (Routledge 2015, OUP 2022, UCP forthcoming 2025); and a prolific author, with prizes for her women’s rights work and scholarship from the American Society of International Law (2023), the Australia New Zealand Association of International Law (2023), the Australian and New Zealand Woman in Artificial Intelligence Awards (2022) and the Letten Foundation and Young Academy of Norway (2021). She has been chief investigator for gender-equality projects in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Indonesia (Australia DFAT funding). Since 2021, Ramona has been a Women’s Leadership Institute Australia (WLIA) Research Fellow. From 2007 to 2016 Ramona contributed or led work on gender issues at the Centre for Reproductive Rights (New York), the International Center for Transitional Justice (New York) International Organization for Migration (Hanoi and Kiev) and Action Aid International (Accra, Brussels, Managua).
About the Discussant
Barbara Havelková holds degrees from Charles University in Prague (Mgr – Master in Law; summa cum laude), Europa-Institut of Saarland University (LLM) and the University of Oxford (Mst in Legal Research, DPhil).
Barbara is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda’s College. She was previously the Shaw Foundation Fellow at Lincoln College and held other posts at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College) and Oxford (Balliol). She worked for Clifford Chance Prague, trained at the Legal Service of the European Commission and in the Chambers of AG Poiares Maduro at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She was an academic visitor at several law schools, including Harvard University and University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar and the Jean Monnet Center of NYU Law School as an Emile Noël Fellow.
Barbara’s research and teaching interests include gender legal studies and feminist jurisprudence, equality and anti-discrimination law, constitutional law, EU law and law in post-socialist transitions. She is a senior member of the Law Faculty’s Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group. Barbara teaches Constitutional Law, EU Law and Feminist Jurisprudence to undergraduates and Comparative Equality Law on the BCL/MJur programme. She also convenes the undergraduate third year option Feminist Perspectives on the Law.
