How can AI help in ensuring gender equality in legislation?

Featured:

Dr. Ramona Vijeyarasa: Senior Lecturer Faculty of Law, UTS; Architect of the Gender Legislative Index

The Hon. Ruth Forrest: Member of the Legislative Council of Tasmania; Independent member for Murchison

Produced and Presented by: Cameron M. Furlong

Music by Trev Lewis from Hagfilms, Drakensson, and TheoTer. Sourced from Freesound.org

As more scrutiny is put on the type of exclusionary and gender-biased language used in legislation, law makers should be looking for ways to improve the process of creating laws. How can we know which laws need changing, and to what degree? Such a question cannot be answered by a human-powered review into every single law in existence – there is just too much to go through, and humans are inherently biased no matter how neutral they claim to be. The challenge has been set, and Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa has a solution – the Gender Legislative Index. The GLI compares legislation to global standards and gives a rating as to how biased or unbiased the law is. The GLI currently being used in 4 countries; Australia, Indonesia, The Philippines, and Sri Lanka to assess laws currently in effect. But what about future laws? Well, thanks to Ruth Forrest, the GLI may start to be directly involved in legislation passed in the Tasmanian Parliament. Hopefully, the value of the GLI is seen and its services are implemented at a Federal Level.