Recording: Making the law work for women

Descriptive transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us for today's event. I want to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we are on the traditional lands of First Nations people. This was land that was never ceded, and I want to take a moment to really respect and honour that ownership. I'm on the land of the Gadigal people. I live in Glebe, so I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. If everyone else can pay respect to the land, to the Elders of the land that they are on today.

I'd also like to share a great acknowledgement from a partner, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. (Video played) Wherever you are across Australia, we acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this land: the Dharug peoples, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Gundungurra people of the Southern Highlands, the Ngunnawal people of the Canberra region on whose country we are standing, and all other peoples of this vast continent, their ongoing connection through custodianship of its land and waters, physical and spiritual, through culture, language and ceremony. Where sovereignty was never ceded, we pay our respects to Elders past, present and still to come.

Thank you for that. My name is Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS, and I also head up our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. It's my huge pleasure to be welcoming you all today.

Today's conversation is about making the law work for women, and it's also our chance to launch Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa's newest book, International Women's Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women, and it's being displayed by Ramona. You'll be able to see that soon. We're also going to be joined by Professor Marian Baird, Catherine Fox, and Dr Heather Nancarrow, and I'll be introducing them all properly a little later.

I'd first like to acknowledge that today's event is also thanks to the UTS International Law Research Cluster, and to give a shout out to them as well.

Legislation clearly has a tremendous potential to advance women's interests and fight gender inequality. It's a key part in fighting domestic violence, guaranteeing reproductive rights, and promoting shared responsibilities for care at home. But the law and lawmakers are failing women time and time again. Worldwide, discrimination against women is rife, aided and abetted by laws, and in the face of turmoil and uncertainty, previously made progress is increasingly at risk.

In her book, Ramona has brought together leading experts on gender equality to better understand gender-responsive domestic legislation. So how are we doing in Australia at meeting international women's rights norms, legislating for gender-based violence, women's reproductive health, labour and equality, and taking gender into consideration around taxation, environmental justice, and good governance? I'm really delighted to throw now to Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa to open the discussion.

Thank you very much, Verity, for that great introduction. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land from wherever you are joining us. As from the Gadigal land of the Eora Nation, I would like to pay my respects to Elders past, present, and emerging.

I'm really thrilled today to be able to launch International Women's Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women. My remarks will really focus on the second part of the book's title, 'making the law work for women', and given the audience, really offer some Australian perspectives. I want to thank the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion for co-hosting today's conversation.

I'm also very grateful that we, as the collaborators for this book, had the support of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia to actually come together last year to have a conversation about how the law can work better in making the world a more equal one. It's thanks to the Academy's workshop grants and the support of Professor Diane Kirkby that we could bring together such a brilliant group of collaborators from really all around the world to discuss what is a global challenge, gender inequality, and I'd love to continue that conversation through the chat and hear from a diversity of women about their experiences of intersectional inequality and how that impact is so often compounded by women's multiple identities.

When I was invited to open today's remarks, I really had to reflect on the dialogue that we as collaborators had when we met for the Making the Law Work for Women symposium, and I knew I could never do justice to the richness of that dialogue because we're such a diverse group of scholars with diverse views on the law, and I'll talk a little bit about that diversity a little later on. So I think it's only really fair just to share my own view, which is that I genuinely believe in the power of the law to do more and be more effective in the fight against gender inequality.

In one of the chapters of the book, Becky and I refer to the words of Audre Lorde, a civil rights activist from New York City in the 1970s. Lorde described herself as black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. She famously wrote the essay, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. We kept coming back to this analogy through our Making the Law Work for Women symposium because that's how many people view the law. The law, both international law and domestic law, is male-centric. It's male-centric in terms of who writes the law, who implements the law, and who judges the law. For many, the legal system cannot bear the weight of women's rights.

At the same time, complete upheaval of the legal system is unrealistic. I suppose I would take this one step further, which is not only that it's unlikely that we're able to burn down the legal system altogether, although we may want to from time to time, I think there is a lot to gain from chipping away at this broken legal system through law reform.

What this book really shows me, as someone who had the privilege of combing through the chapters several times, is three things must underpin that law reform. The first is bringing women back into the law. The second is expanding what we understand to be a women's issue. The third is this ongoing struggle against women and gender being treated as an add-on.

So in terms of bringing women back into the law, feminist scholars and women's rights activists have fought for law reform for decades, and we as collaborators really benefited from that work. In the 1990s, there was a real push for gender-neutral legislation, and we saw the onset of terms like 'them' and 'theirs', 'he' and 'she', and 'chairperson' in the law. But these gender-neutral laws often left the law blind to women's experiences.

So we may want to ask ourselves, can we write the law for women? Now, this is one of those points where there wasn't complete agreement among the collaborators. As lawyers in a legal system like Australia, we don't write the law for one group. The blanket law is written for everyone. But what quickly happens is that law fails to acknowledge difference.

You can take any piece of legislation, and that law will be experienced differently depending on whether you're a man or a woman, or you don't identify as either. How a woman experiences the law will naturally be impacted by multiple factors, including her race, whether she's married, single, cohabiting, whether she's wealthy or poor, whether she's a migrant or from a non-English speaking background.

Law reform can only go so far, but the end goal has to be gender-responsive legislation. It may be correctional measures like gender equality quotas, it may be rethinking our law altogether, and hopefully we'll hear from Marian about how our paid parental leave scheme in Australia needs a rethink if we're actually going to shatter the norms that are upholding unequal care. It may be controversially writing the law for women.

Now in Australia, we shied away from this approach and we've tended to have gender-neutral laws. When we have written women into the law, we've tended to promote gender stereotypes such as naming women as primary carers in our Paid Parental Leave Act. When it comes to domestic violence or sexual harassment, or laws that entitle people to leave from work for family or domestic violence, our laws remain gender neutral, even though we know women are the majority victims of domestic violence, for example. Not every country legislates this way. There's legislation in some countries around the world where the law is written for women when it comes to domestic violence—in Spain, in the Philippines, in India, in Costa Rica—in a way that acknowledges women are the primary victims.

Regardless of the approach, the end result has to be legislation that acknowledges that the law will be experienced differently by different people. If we are going to rewrite the law, we need data to actually understand how different people are experiencing the law, because we cannot correct what we do not properly understand.

The second core ingredient that really comes out in this book is expanding what counts as a women's issue.

I was really privileged to spend a decade before joining UTS working in civil society and advocating as groups of women rights activists, including before the UN. At one point, women's reproductive rights was my bread and butter, and it was a real pleasure to have former colleagues from the Center for Reproductive Rights bring to this book their case studies on abortion law reform in Kenya, Rwanda, India, and Nepal.

Now, these are the kinds of issues that women's rights activists and scholars focus on because they're fundamental women's rights issues—gender-based violence, abortion law reform, unequal pay, gender equality quotas—but there has to be an expansion in what we understand to be women's issues. We need more and more women with gender expertise in these so-called gender-neutral areas, like the environment, like taxation, like corruption. We need to bring a gender perspective to all areas of law and have women sitting at the legal draughts table when a country decides how it's going to design, for example, its tax system or spend those taxes on things like subsidies for childcare. Kathleen Lahey and Miranda Stewart bring this out really nicely in the book in their chapter on gender and taxation.

So, on top of writing the law for women, and expanding what counts as a women's issue, the third ingredient I wanted to bring out in these initial remarks was really continuing this ongoing battle where gender and women are treated as an add-on. There's great research in the book by José Miguel Bedro-Bedrino on corruption and Rowena Maguire on gender and the environment, which really centres around the work of First Nations scholars in this space. Both of those authors, in their entirely independent chapters, name the same issue: in international dialogues, when delegates are meeting to negotiate the provisions of international treaties, they often turn to the gender issues to take a break from the so-called tough issues of the day—as in, let's take a break, deal with the gender stuff, and then we'll get back to the real work of the day. That sort of mentality leads to a tick-box exercise, rather than a critical and constructive conversation about how to bring a gender perspective into international law in a way that might actually shift existing power relations.

So just to conclude, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that lawmaking was not always this way. This book brings together scholars who are newer to the field of gender equality, as well as scholars who have been working on these issues for decades, who really laid the path and remember the days when governments cared when they appeared before the UN and were shamed for their gender record, or alternatively were proud when they were setting new gender-responsive global and legislative trends. Marian Sawer is one of the contributors to this book who's fought for gender equality quotas and gender-equal partners for decades, who really remembers these heydays in Australia. So I think it's worth saying that it doesn't have to be this way, because it wasn't always this way. Perhaps it's about asking, where are the entry points for us to make some headway on actually achieving gender-responsive laws that are going to do something about these decades of inequality?

Thank you very much, Verity.

Thanks, Ramona. That was fantastic, and a wonderful opening.

Just before I introduce the rest of our panellists, I should point out that Ramona is the architect behind the Gender Legislative Index, which is the first comprehensive IT-based tool to make legislation work more effectively to improve women's lives, so people should check that out. She's also, of course, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law here at UTS, a research fellow with the Women's Leadership Institute Australia, and the editor of International Women's Rights and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women, which of course is the book she's just been referring to, and which, if you click on the link in the chat, you can go and buy yourself a copy, which I encourage everyone to do.

Now it's my pleasure to introduce today's panellists, and we're going to open this up to a bit of a panel discussion. First, Marian Baird. Marian Baird is Professor of Gender and Employment Relations and the Presiding Pro-Chancellor of the University of Sydney. Marian is one of Australia's leading researchers in the field of women, work and family, and was awarded an AO in 2016 for outstanding services to improving the quality of women's working lives and for contributions to tertiary education. Marian's research was instrumental in the development of Australia's paid parental leave scheme, and she is co-convener of the International Parental Leave Network. Welcome, Marian.

Catherine Fox is a leading commentator on women and the workforce, an award-winning journalist, author and presenter. During a long career with the Financial Review, she edited several sections of the newspaper and wrote the Corporate Woman column. She has also published five books, including Stop Fixing Women, which I particularly enjoyed, Catherine, and along with her journalism, was awarded the 2017 Walkley Award for Women's Leadership in Media. Catherine helped establish the annual Financial Review 100 Women of Influence Awards. She is a gender equality advisor to the Australian Defence Force, sits on the Australian's Investing in Women Board, and is co-founder of the Sydney Women's Giving Circle. Welcome, Catherine.

For 40 years, Dr Heather Nancarrow has worked to address violence against women, including through community services and advocacy, government policy and research. Heather is the retiring CEO of Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety and an adjunct research fellow at the Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University. Her scholarship is focused on justice responses to violence against women. Welcome, Heather.

All right. I'm going to start with a question to all panellists. We've just heard Ramona's perspectives on this, so let's start with a broad question for the rest of you. As briefly as you can, I'm going to give you two minutes each. I'm going to ask, why is it necessary to bring gender into consideration when legislating? We might start with you, Marian.

[Panel discussion continues, with Marian Baird, Catherine Fox, and Heather Nancarrow each responding in turn, discussing the necessity of bringing gender into consideration when legislating, providing examples from their research and experience, and highlighting the importance of adapting laws to social change, the impact of gendered assumptions in law, and the need for intersectional analysis.]

[Further discussion led by Verity Firth, including questions to the panel about fixing the system not the women, the effectiveness of policies aimed at reducing gender gaps, the evolution of how violence against women is dealt with in law, and whether Australia should look internationally for legislative models.]

[Audience Q&A session, including questions about the origins of male-centric gender bias in lawmaking, the influence of Canberra culture versus broader colonial legal structures, the impact of diversity in legislatures, the importance of including First Nations women's voices in law reform, especially around coercive control, and the challenge of ensuring effective implementation of gender-responsive laws.]

[Closing remarks from Verity Firth, thanking panellists and audience, congratulating Ramona Vijeyarasa on her book, and providing information about accessing the recording.]