The Gender Legislative Index

Welcome to the Gender Legislative Index. If you are here, it already shows that you care whether legislation being passed all around the world is actually helping to combat gender inequality. I am Ramona Vijeyarasa. I joined the University of Technology Sydney in 2017 as a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellow after a long career as a women’s rights advocate working at local and international N-G-Os and international organisations all around the world.

Through that work, I’ve been privileged to meet with hundreds of women who have suffered from laws not written with women in mind. Laws that reenforce the status quo or worse – laws that actually create new dimensions of discrimination.

I’ve also noticed the tendency for our global efforts in the fight for gender equality to focus on very specific and important concerns, like gender-based violence and reproductive health. However, so often our focus ends up being solely on women’s bodies as the site of concern. Too frequently we forget or ignore the importance of gender in areas of law that we may presume have little to do with women, like taxation or financial services, but we know affect women every day. Does your government tax individuals or family units? Do the laws in your country accommodate the fact that women may not have collateral in their name when trying to get a bank loan?

I designed the Gender Legislative Index to be a tool that can help us get to the next step. Gender-responsive legislation. Laws that actually take women’s rights and needs into account, whether that is a law on equal pay or a law on climate change. The Gender Legislative Index has been piloted on 90 laws from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines. Legislation all enacted under the tenure of women leaders from the three countries. The results show examples of both good and poor performing laws.

For instance, the Gender Legislative Index shows when a law fails to ensure women have access to essential services, or the law denies women free decision-making, or leaves a woman whose rights have been abused without a fair remedy and with no access to justice. I call these gender-regressive laws that fail to meet international standards.

The G-L-I can also show us how often we decide that a law is gender neutral, even when that law has actually failed to take into account gender differences between men and women, and are therefore blind to women’s needs.

The analysis you can find on this website was performed by a group of evaluators who conducted a textual analysis of the law. All of the data was processed through a machine-learning algorithm to ensure that all laws – irrespective of the area of law – are treated similarly, mitigating some of our preconceived biases when giving a final score. You can also dig deeper and access all the rich data produced by each individual evaluator.

The G-L-I is also working towards showing us not only what is happening on paper, but also whether some of these well-drafted laws are actually having a positive effect on women’s lives through its insights from the field.

My hope is that the Gender Legislative Index will help activists, legislators and local and global policymakers see how the law can play a role in correcting discrimination and advancing gender equality.

The time is now. We know that there is no country in the world where men and women are equal. We also know that world leaders are listening. The World Bank has acknowledged gender-regressive laws as the biggest obstacle to equality, while the G-7 endorsed gender-responsive laws as the solution when they met in May 2019. So I hope you find the Gender Legislative Index useful in our collective fight for gender equality.