NLS Special Lecture | Gendered Technology: Navigating Law, Data, and Social Justice

NLSIU will host a special lecture on ‘Gendered Technology: Navigating Law, Data, and Social Justice’ by Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa from the University of Technology Sydney on July 25, 2024, 5 PM.

Abstract 

Can technology be harnessed for social good? And what is the law’s role when it comes to addressing the gendered harms of new technologies? Set in a context where the world is still over a century away from closing the gender gap, Associate Professor Vijeyarasa will discuss her motivations for going beyond the boundaries of the law to offer new solutions to address gender inequality globally. Drawing from her experiences as the architect of the Gender Legislative Index, she will share her thoughts on why law, technology & data offer new potential to make the world more equal. On the flip side, drawing from her recent research on the gendered harms of artificial intelligence (AI), Dr Vijeyarasa will share emerging good practices on how to regulate and address the biases that underpin AI. She will also share her advice, from her first foray to her most recent experiences using technology for social justice as a ‘data outsider’, as well as her insights on the role of women in data, data science & technology.

About the Speaker

Ramona Vijeyarasa is a legal academic and women’s rights activist. An Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), she is the designer behind the award-winning Gender Legislative Index, a collaboration with Rapido Social and the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre, a tool that uses human evaluators and machine-learning to assess how well laws work for women. Her career began as a corporate lawyer in Sydney. Driven by a passion for human rights, her focus unsurprisingly shifted to international women’s rights law. Ramona’s decade working in civil society has taken her from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, capturing the stories of survivors of domestic violence, to the floating villages of Cambodia, where she supported women’s demands for better access to reproductive health care. As a legal activist, Ramona has helped advance anti-trafficking victim reintegration networks in Vietnam and Ukraine, filed briefs before the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Moldova and the Supreme Court of the Philippines and made submissions to United Nations treaty bodies. This rich experience informs her impact-driven approach to research, where sound methodologies are created to deliver tangible change in order to improve lives through the law.

Excerpts from the lecture:

“So as someone who spent many years working overseas, I was really motivated by the fact that gender inequality is a global challenge that has not been resolved in any country in the world. I see the law and technology as coming together to help to create a solution. In short, I wanted to create an index to help measure whether the law was getting it right, to measure whether the law can do better in terms of advancing women’s rights.”

“I started my research on making laws more responsive to women’s rights and after some time I arrived at a point where legal or policy knowledge or solutions I had were not enough. I needed help. I needed to collaborate and started looking to data scientists and software engineers to do that. First I had to actually figure out that they were the people I needed.”

“The end result of my search for collaborators outside of law was a partnership with software engineers at UTS Rapido Social – a low-bono/pro-bono team of engineers in our Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology – and with data analysis and visualisation experts at the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre. I owe them many thanks for believing in my vision for a tool to demonstrate better whether law is playing its part to correct inequality and advance women through the Gender Legislative Index.”

“The Global Legislative Index (GLI) is an interface used to measure how effectively domestic laws respond to women’s needs and interests. It is grounded in international women’s rights but has the capacity to evaluate individual provisions of domestic laws, not just indicate whether or not a law exists. It is powered by a mix of human and machine learning.”