Rapido Social Impact

Gender inequality is one of the world's greatest challenges.
Women's lives today are better than they were a century ago, but gender inequality persists.

Legislation has been reformed over time to be more and more progressive, but as an international women's rights lawyer and scholar,

I don't think there's been a complete re-imagining of what gender-responsive legislation could mean for women's lives.

To do that research, I created a partnership with Rapido Social in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Together we created the Gender Legislative Index.  The Gender Legislative Index can tell you whether a law is gender-responsive or not.
It uses criteria from the most important Global Women's Rights Treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW, to measure gender-responsiveness.

Human evaluators have at hand benchmarks from international and regional law to make evaluations in really diverse legal domains.
Based on the Gender Legislative Index's methodology, Tasmanian Parliament created a committee to audit legislation from a gender perspective.

It was the first parliament across the whole of Australia to exclusively focus on auditing from a gender perspective.

On the committee's invitation, I flew to Hobart in 2023 to help them audit their first bill. Thanks to the gender lensing of this particular bill, the committee was able to raise questions and issues that weren't in the draft bill,  such as what do you do when a local councillor harasses another councillor, or how do you ensure that any committee has a fair composition of men and women. So where to next?

I want to create the first multi-regional database of gender-responsive legislation and to go beyond the current laws to include issues such as paid parental leave, or how do we regulate against gender bias in artificial intelligence.

Women scholars and policymakers and activists have been working on gender inequality for decades. And of course we've made huge strides, but there's still so far to go.

And I think at this moment in time we need something far more innovative at scale if we're going to achieve gender equality and accelerate the pace of change.

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