Ramona Vijeyarasa is the Chief Investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index, a tool designed to promote laws that advance women’s rights and gender equality. Ramona is one of Australia’s leading scholars on gender and the law. Her current research focuses on strengthening accountability for women’s rights at the domestic level across diverse and often over-looked areas of law. It particularly seeks to advance the gender responsiveness of domestic legislation by providing benchmarks for the drafting of new laws and for evaluating existing ones based on global human rights commitments.
An Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney where she is also the Juris Doctor Program Head, Ramona has a decade of experience working in civil society as a women’s rights activist.
In 2023, Ramona was honoured by the American Society of International Law (ASIL), receiving the Women in International Law Interest Group’s (WILIG) Scholarship Prize for Excellence in International Law Scholarship involving Women and Girls, Gender and Feminist Approaches (2022). She also received the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law’s (ANZSIL) Prize for Best Article in 2023. In 2022 Ramona was named the Woman in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Winner in the Law Category and 2nd runner-up as the Women in AI Innovator of the Year. These accolades join grants and awards from New York University, the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Letten Foundation and Young Academy of Norway.
Her latest book, The Woman President: Leadership, Law and Legacy for Women Based on Experiences from South and Southeast Asia was published by Oxford University Press in July 2022.
