By WLIA Fellow Prof Ramona Vijeyarasa
Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan is one of only four women in Nigeria’s 109-seat senate. Allegations by Ms Akpoti-Uduaghan that she was sexually harassed by Godswill Akpabio, the Senate’s President were struck down by the Senate Ethics Committee on 6 March, oddly just when the rest of the world was gearing up to celebrate International Women’s Day. The Committee went on to suspend Akpoti-Uduaghan for 6 months without pay for “unruly and disruptive” behavior, claiming this was not in retaliation for the allegations that she made but because of unrelated behaviour in the senate in a dispute about seating arrangements.
Akpoti-Uduaghan’s current battle is a telling reminder – if we needed one – that numbers matter and that women who are part of such a small minority, bear an impossible burden to push for change. Years ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg delighted many when she opined that there will be enough women on the Supreme Court “when there are nine”. Our imaginations ran wild, picturing parliaments full of women, all women benches or board room scenes where women occupy seats and not just deliver the coffee. RBG envisaged the Barbie world that we came to laugh about – or even cry about – in a film that reminded us how far we had to go. For some, the end goal seems even farther now.
From a scholarly perspective, there has been a significant investment in demonstrating that more women necessarily means better results. As we continue to wait for the hoped-for numbers to come to fruition, I have come to pay greater attention to feminist ways of doing.
Some of these may be more familiar to readers such as the feminist judgments projects, one that had their origin in Canada’s women’s court. Collectives of scholars rewrite decisions from a feminist perspective and their work has sparked a series of “rewrites” – feminist, queer, Indigenous and environmental judgments projects, as well as the more recent feminist legislation project. They seek to tell the world that the job of law-making can be done differently.
I was delighted to be awarded an Australian Research Council grant last year that will again allow myself, as Lead Chief Investigator (CI) working with Co-CIs Profs. Kim Rubenstein and Jacqueline Mowbray, to think about how the job of law-making can be done differently. Our project will study parliamentary bodies that audit bills and legislation for their gendered impacts, how these committees function and with what impact. Our research (2025-2027) was prompted by a development in 2022, when Tasmania established Australia’s only parliamentary committee in any state, territory or federal jurisdiction focused exclusively on gender-auditing of new bills (the Tasmanian Joint Sessional Gender and Equality Audit Committee).
The Committee’s creation was partly influenced by the Gender Legislative Index, which I created at the University of Technology Sydney to evaluate legislation against international women’s rights benchmarks. Tasmania’s Independent Member of Parliament, Ruth Forrest, a formidable advocate for women’s rights, who instigated the Motion establishing the Tasmanian Committee, was interested in the idea underpinning the Gender Legislative Index that legislation should not be written in gender neutral terms but rather take into account the different ways in which people of different genders – men, women and non-binary people – all experience legislation differently.
In studying the composition, practices and impact of parliamentary committees, our project will interrogate whether these bodies that audit legislation for their gendered impacts make a difference. We will conduct our study in Tasmania, but also in the ACT, where the Standing Committee on the Economy and Gender and Economic Equality mainstream gender in its work; and research and visit similar long-standing parliamentary committees in Canada and Spain. We want to understand if their work is merely performative and whether any committees have shareable lessons on how to listen more deeply to those women most impacted by law reform. We will study whether these committees actively seek out women’s lived experiences through participation in law-making, as a form of gendered citizenship. Finally, we will evaluate their impact. Do such committees exercise a genuine influence over the legislative process, in ways that can improve women’s lives through law reform?
Our expectations are not particularly high. We anticipate that the bills, which we will evaluate through the Gender Legislative Index, will not be that different from the legislation enacted after the committees’ reviews. But the possibility of being proven wrong is an exciting one, especially if in just three years, we will have at hand good practice on how to use a parliamentary committee to help write better laws for women.
