Cutting-edge Tech Allows Lawyers to Legislate for 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?

A novel initiative between UTS engineering, data science and legal expertise is enabling Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa from the UTS Faculty of Law to create a unique way to answer these questions.

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

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 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.

The GLI is now available online and Dr Vijeyarasa says the next step is to look at a further 10 areas of law across 15 other countries:

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.

Sophie Ritchie is the Manager of the Rapido Social program, a unique social innovation initiative which makes cutting-edge technology services more available to the social impact sector.  With Dr Vijeyarasa, she has been managing the digital delivery of the GLI. 

The GLI is an excellent example of innovating through leveraging multi-disciplinary expertise. Rapido technologists drove the User Experience (UX) work and software engineering that powers the GLI; and Ramona brought the legal expertise to the collaboration. To-date, this project has been one of the greatest successes of the Rapido Social program.

Dr Vijeyarasa is also currently using 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 plans to do the same with Julia Gillard’s time as Prime Minister.

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

The GLI is also designed to help legislators produce new bills that play their part in correcting discrimination and advancing equality and women’s rights.

UTS Rapido Social was established in 2017 by Hervé Harvard, Director, Rapido, to make cutting-edge technology services more available to the social impact sector.  The program uses engineering to create public impact for communities that need it most, and to help solve pressing societal challenges. Since its inception, it has delivered nine different social impact projects in seven different cause areas on a pro-bono or low-bono basis.