Ramona Vijeyarasa: On Law as a Feminist Tool for Transformation
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Ramona Vijeyarasa: On Law as a Feminist Tool for Transformation
Ramona Vijeyarasa sees power not just in institutions, but in what we choose to see and in the stories we elevate or erase.
It is late February in Sydney, the last days of summer lingering in the warm air, when I meet the dynamic Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa over bowls of phở. We're in a dimly lit Vietnamese place around the corner from the University of Technology Sydney, where she is based. The room fills around us as we trace the contours of gender inequality and unpack the strategic terrain of feminist legal reform. On my way home, I listen, in preparation for writing this piece, to snippets of her press tour for her book The Woman President, which asks what difference women leaders make – a question that has sparked a rare degree of public resonance for an academic work.
What strikes me about Ramona is the clarity with which she sees power – not just the power that sits in institutions like the United Nations, multilateral agencies, or governments, but the power all of us hold in what we choose to see, what we measure, and what stories we carry forward. It echoes something Associate Professor Seye Abimbola said in his On Theory conversation: power distorts, shaping what is visible and what remains hidden. Ramona’s work challenges these distortions, showing how the stories we tell about progress can mask the limits of laws that claim to protect while leaving deeper inequities unresolved.
Ramona brings the kind of careful, evidence-driven analysis that recentres the conversation away from dominant Western narratives and toward a more globally inclusive, rights-based view of gender equality. She makes the case for human rights frameworks not only as legal obligations but as tools to build a more balanced picture of equality – work she has advanced through Quantifying CEDAW in Harvard’s Human Rights Journal, and the Gender Legislative Index, a tool that ranks and scores legislation against women’s rights standards. This work is about correcting narratives that flatten complexity, and providing policymakers, advocates, and researchers with the tools they need to design stronger laws – to see clearly where progress is meaningful and where gaps remain, and how change can move from aspiration to reality.
In this conversation, we talk about what it takes to move governments to act, the power of benchmarks in the slow craft of law reform, and the role of feminist imagination in rewriting the rules – clause by clause – toward laws that reflect women’s lives as they are, and as they should be.
Following the questions that won’t let go
When I ask Ramona how she decides what to work on, she resists the idea of a neatly planned career trajectory. “I don’t think it’s a very deliberate process,” she says. I think there is a natural evolution in the way ideas come. At the same time, there are issues that have sat with me for a long time that resurface at a particular moment.”
Formative questions
Take The Woman President, her recent book exploring what difference – if any – woman leaders make. The seeds were planted during her undergraduate studies at the University of New South Wales, where she studied women’s political participation in Asia. “The sentiment at the time was women could only lead in the region as wives, sisters, or daughters of powerful men,” she recalls. “There was truth to that – sociocultural factors shaped those leadership pathways - but it also sold short what women went on to do one they held power.”
“The sentiment at the time was women could only lead in the region as wives, sisters, or daughters of powerful men. There was truth to that – sociocultural factors shaped those leadership pathways - but it also sold short what women went on to do once they held power."
Bridging theory and practice
That early discomfort with inherited assumptions continues to shape Ramona’s broader body of work, especially her design of the Gender Legislative Index. “What I find interesting about the theory behind centring women’s lives in legislation is that it is part of core feminist theory from the 1980s. A lot of, particularly Anglo-Saxon origin feminists raised these issues,” she says. “Scholars like Jenny Morgan and Margaret Thornton argued for women’s standpoint as the basis for lawmaking.” But what’s been missing, she argues, is an answer to the practical question: how?
It’s a gap that legal scholar Hilary Charlesworth once critiqued, warning that feminist theorists risked “talking to ourselves,” circling the same debates without advancing tools for real-world application. “That’s really motivating,” Ramona says. “There’s an evidence gap I can help fill – and fill it in a different way.”
Part of that difference comes from her perspective. As a woman of colour in an overwhelmingly white Australian academic landscape, she brings a Global South consciousness to conversations often dominated by Anglophone voices. “There’s not enough attention paid to the richness of scholarship outside the Anglo-West,” she says. She points to the work of Liberian scholar Robtel Neajai Pailey, whose critique of the “the white Western gaze” in global development has shaped her own thinking. “How do we bring a non-white Western gaze to this conversation? That’s what I hope to contribute – building on the foundations laid by feminist scholars in the 1980s, but offering examples, critiques, and good practice from the Global South.”
Progress, re-examined
The myths we tell about rights and reform
Ramona resists the comfort of linear narratives. It would be easier, she says, to chart a straight line from exclusion to equality over the past century. But the history of women’s rights is messier than that – marked not by steady progress, but by fits and starts, and by laws that often obscure more than they reveal. The stories we tell about progress often mask how power adapts – framing restrictions as protections, or celebrating achievements that leave deeper inequalities intact.
She turns to 1919, the year the International Labour Organisation (ILO) adopted its first Maternity Protection Convention (No.3), a treaty still invoked as a foundational milestone for working women’s rights. But the closer you look, she suggests, the more complicated the legacy becomes.
“Women could only be present as advisers to delegations,” Ramona says. “Although the charter said women should be present in discussions that concern themselves, we were present, but we were silent.”
And the six weeks of leave so often cited as a victory? It wasn’t a right that was granted to women – it was a restriction imposed on women. The Convention prohibited women from returning to work in the six weeks following childbirth, a policy presented as a protection but grounded in paternalism.
It’s a striking example, Ramona notes, of how legal systems operate as double-edged tools – capable of expanding rights, but also of reinforcing control.
Who gets credit for progress?
Who gets credit for progress?
For Ramona, change isn’t just about bold commitments or policy wins – it’s about ensuring rights translate into the realities of daily life. “Reproductive rights are often treated as a narrow issue,” she says, “but they’re foundational. Unless women can decide whether and when to have children, we’ll never achieve full equality.” For her, this is inseparable from broader issues like access to finance, freedom from gender-based violence, and women knowing and exercising their rights at work. It’s also about recognising where progress is really happening – and who gets credit for it.
Too often, that recognition excludes the Global South. She points to the Philippines, which introduced ten days of paid leave for victims of violence in 2004 - fourteen years before New Zealand drew international praise for enacting the same measure. “When New Zealand announced their ten days of paid leave in 2018, The Guardian called it a world-first,” Ramona recalls. Three days later, they issued a correction acknowledging the Philippines had done it first – though without noting the 14-year gap – and mentioned similar provisions in Canada.”
It wasn’t an isolated incident. When Australia introduced comparable legislation in 2022, coming into force in 2023, the global media once again celebrated it as a pioneering move – overlooking the countries that led the way.
Her research on Latin American legal systems reveal that eight Spanish-speaking jurisdictions had already adopted the policy before New Zealand. “Who gets recognised for progress, and how gets overlooked?” she asks.
“There are lots of biases that play out in where we perceive gender equality as being most advanced, and in which countries we learn from,” she says. “Countries like the Philippines are routinely sidelined - by regional powers like Australia, and by international development narratives more broadly.”
“There are lots of biases that play out in where we perceive gender equality as being most advanced, and in which countries we learn from.”
She offers other overlooked examples. South Korea’s Public Toilets Act, passed in 2007, mandates that women’s toilets in public spaces equal or exceed those for men – a policy rooted in biological realities, rarely considered in gender-responsive planning. “Who would ever think to look at South Korea as a model – not just in gender responsive budgeting, but in how those budgets can shape policies that materially improve women’s lives?”
For Ramona, these cases reveal a deeper truth: we need to rewrite our assumptions about who leads, who innovates, and where we look for models of gender equality.
Rethinking gender indices: what are we measuring?
The problem with gender indices
It’s not just who we celebrate, Ramona says – it’s also how we measure progress. She is frank about the limitations of existing indices. “It’s a very flooded field, and I’m really conscious of that as someone who’s produced another index,” she notes. What’s often missing, she argues, is a grounding in human rights frameworks. Instruments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) are legally binding and require governments to uphold the full spectrum of women’s rights – from access to healthcare and education to protection from violence, participation in public life, labour rights, and reproductive autonomy.
“I think the challenge with indicators largely developed from and used by the development-sector without a human rights framework, is they can be too selective,” she explains. “They tend to cast a very particular light on the Global South – and my concern has only amplified and amplified over recent years.”
In her article Quantifying CEDAW, Ramona explores how indicators often penalise countries with higher rates of female genital mutilation or control over women’s dress. “It’s not that these issues aren’t critical,” she says. “But when they become your only marker of freedom or civil liberties or freedom from gender-based violence, it creates bias against countries doing potentially great work around gender-responsive law reform. And those efforts are being ignored in ways that perpetuate a Euro-centric bias about gender equality leadership.”
What it takes to move governments
Moving governments to act
When I ask Ramona what she’s learned about influencing governments, she doesn’t hesitate. ‘It’s really slow,” she says. “Even the most progressive governments have to be selective around the gender issues they’ll take up.” But change does happen – through persistence, trust, and timing. “A solid evidence base and a lot of long-term relationship-building are essential for someone to champion an agenda,” she says.
Timing, in particular, can be catalytic. In The Woman President, Ramona explores patterns behind breakthrough reforms, like the Philippines’ 2004 gender-based violence law. It followed the suicide of a high-profile actress and mayor’s wife. “There was this public sense - if she can be a victim of violence, then we all can,” she says. The outcry gave rise to Taskforce Maria, and ultimately legal reform.”
But even with political will, implementation can falter – especially in policy domains not traditionally viewed through a gender lens. Drawing on her work on modern slavery law, Ramona highlights how gender is routinely sidelined. “No modern slavery law is written in a gender-responsive way,” she explains. “They talk about human rights due diligence, but ignore how exploitation is gendered.”
When a peer reviewer questioned whether naming the gender dimension made any real difference, Ramona responded with disarming clarity: “The difference is we can start to acknowledge how hard it is for a woman worker to report sexual harassment to a male manager - or even ask for toilet breaks. It means creating pathways in which women workers in the supply chain can get together, articulate what they want, and communicate those demands to management. It matters because maybe a consumer many miles away will care that there's a gender dimension - and that could be the entry point to changing consumer practices.”
Even small acknowledgements can feel like uphill battles. In one instance, her recommendation made to the Statutory Review of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 (handed down in 2023) for ‘gender-sensitive due diligence’ was discussed in one paragraph of a 140-page report: ‘An example is a proposal in one submission for ‘gender-sensitive due diligence’. She recalls the moment with incredulity. “Is the idea that different people will be impacted differently by supply chain exploitation on the basis of their sex or gender so new and so unimaginable?” But to her, it’s a reminder of why the work matters: because so many systems can’t imagine that equity should be built in from the start.
“Is the idea that different people will be impacted differently by supply chain exploitation on the basis of their sex or gender so new and so unimaginable?”
Old battles, new forms
On global backlash against rights
As our conversation turns to the global backlash against women’s rights, Ramona speaks with a calm insistence. “Religious fundamentalisms have always been at play,” she says. “Despite decades of advocacy, 99% of the world’s countries treat abortion as an issue that sits under a criminal law umbrella. Women’s bodies and lives have always been controlled. Women’s organisations need to use the tools we have always used, which is to mobilise, to be strategic, and to continue the good fight.”
She’s also wary of letting the United States (U.S.) dominate the narrative on rights. “I find what’s going on in the U.S. deeply alarming, but the more we give it attention, the more we feed into this idea of the U.S. as the leader of the free world.”
It’s a narrative she refuses to accept. “The U.S. has never had a woman president. There’s backlash when women participate politically. The U.S. has no federally funded parental leave. It has not ratified CEDAW. So, I’ll never buy into that.”
“The U.S. has never had a woman president. There’s backlash when women participate politically. The U.S. has no federally funded parental leave. It has not ratified CEDAW. So, I’ll never buy into that.”
Instead, she draws attention to other, oven-overlooked shifts. “The rise of regressive governments in Europe is more concerning,” she says. As authoritarianism and nationalism gain ground, women’s rights are often the first to be recast – as threats to tradition, family or national identity.
As our conversation winds down – she has a meeting to run to – what stays with me is Ramona’s insistence that change begins with what we choose to see. Her work urges us to look beyond policy headlines and legal texts, to ask who writes the rules and whose lives they serve. It is a call for sharper tools, yes – but also for clearer eyes, steadier hands, and a feminist imagination bold enough to revise the story. Gender equality isn’t just in the winning of rights, she reminds us, but in rewriting what power looks like.
Image credit: "Bookcase" by Clarisse Meyer