Balance the Scales: Law & Justice in action

Pathways to Politics for Women

Scientia Professor and Anthony Mason Professor Rosalind Dixon, Dr Elisabeth Perham and Marian Iskander

Women remain underrepresented in political leadership in New South Wales, reflecting long-standing structural and cultural barriers to participation. NSW Pathways to Politics for Women expands and reshapes pathways into political life by doing things differently. Based within the UNSW Gender Equality Hub, this nonpartisan program empowers women from diverse backgrounds to step into politics with strong skills, confidence, and supportive networks.

Co-led by Professor Rosalind Dixon, Dr Elisabeth Perham, and Marian Iskander, the program brings together research, training and collaboration to support women across metropolitan, regional, and rural NSW, strengthening women’s political participation and democratic practice.

Beyond individual leadership development, the NSW Pathways team works closely with alumnae, supporters, and members of the NSW Parliament to influence broader policy and institutional reform. This includes advocacy around care and representation, and efforts to create safer and fairer parliamentary workplaces.

Reproductive justice for single women in China

Xue Qian and Professor Kun Fan

Research shows that when single women challenge reproductive restrictions in court, they help spark public debate and push reproductive justice onto the policy agenda. 

In their joint article, Xue Qian and Professor Kun Fan examined how China’s laws currently privilege married women, limiting single women’s access to egg freezing and maternity benefits. Their work aligns shows how litigation becomes a tool to confront these inequalities. Even when courts reject these cases, they still draw attention to gendered exclusions and force policymakers to respond.

Their research shifts the focus away from courtroom wins to the broader impact of these lawsuits. By analysing cases brought by single women, they show how legal challenges can expose hidden inequalities, legitimise single women as reproductive decision-makers, and drive policy change outside the courtroom.

Their research highlights litigation as a practical way for marginalised women to challenge restrictive systems and reshape reproductive governance without direct political confrontation.

Child-centred justice in cases of sexual violence

Tirtawening Tirtawening

Survivors of child sexual abuse, especially girls, still face challenges in accessing justice due to fragmented and discriminatory laws, unclear definitions of sexual violence, and legal procedures that are not child-friendly. 

These challenges are further reinforced by cultural and religious interpretations that normalise silence, obedience, and unequal power relations. Combined with adult-centred approaches within law enforcement and society, children’s voices and experiences are often marginalised.

This year’s International Women’s Day theme, Balance the Scales, is central to Tirtawening’s research on child sexual abuse in Indonesia. Tirtawening’s research calls for clearer laws and child-friendly processes that prioritise the rights and voices of girls who experience violence. 

Tirtawening’s research seeks to balance the scales by challenging laws, legal procedures and adult-centred practices to become more child-centred. It places children’s rights, particularly the right to be heard and to participate, at the core of legal responses to sexual violence. Having clear legal definitions and language is also crucial, as these guide victims and law enforcement in recognising, reporting and responding to abuse, thereby strengthening access to justice.

Sexual violence, public environments and structural responsibility

Associate Professor Dr Phillip Wadds

Associate Professor Dr Phillip Wadd’s research shows how sexual violence in public spaces, including music festivals, places unequal safety burdens on women and gender diverse people. His findings have shaped practical reforms such as staff training, bystander programs and safe space initiatives, and now guide NSW nightlife reforms and a statewide 2026 campaign to create safer, more equitable public environments. 

His work makes one point clear: safety shouldn’t depend on those most at risk adapting their behaviour. It requires changing the environments, systems and industries that produce harm in the first place.

Since 2017, Dr Wadds has explored how sexual violence, community safety and knowledge translation intersect to answer a core question: how can public spaces support participation without fear or disproportionate risk? His festival research shows that despite inclusive branding, sexual harm often shifts participation from enjoyment to vigilance. 

By moving responsibility from individuals to the systems that shape public environments, his work drives evidence-based reforms and informs statewide efforts to prevent sexual violence and harassment across NSW nightlife precincts in 2026.

Domestic and family violence and economic security

Emma Golledge, Kingsford Legal Centre

Financial abuse and economic insecurity can trap women in unsafe situations. Kingsford Legal Centre (KLC) supports women to rebuild their lives and advocates for systems that don’t force survivors into long-term hardship. 

For many women, leaving an unsafe home means walking out in minutes, leaving behind possessions, stability and income. They must start again at a time when the risk of serious harm is highest, all while trying to keep children safe, fed and in school, and maintain their own employment. KLC supports women at every stage of domestic and family violence because being safe should not mean becoming homeless or financially devastated.

Women in Australia experience high rates of gender-based violence, which often leads to long-term economic disadvantage. KLC helps women escaping violence to navigate the complex and traumatic process of unpicking financial abuse and recovering from the financial fallout. The Centre also advocates for broader reforms that recognise the economic impact of gender-based violence and ensure that leaving violence does not mean a life of poverty. 

Women at Risk: Trauma informed legal support for asylum seeking women

RACS Women at Risk team

RACS provides safe, trauma-informed legal support for women navigating complex systems. Its Safer Futures toolkit helps practitioners better support refugee women facing violence. 

Australia’s immigration system is complex and often harsh, making it difficult for people seeking asylum to access justice. Trauma, limited English, social isolation and an overwhelming asylum process create significant barriers.

For asylum seeking women who are also experiencing or at risk of gender-based violence, the challenges are even greater. They must navigate overlapping immigration, criminal and family law systems while managing the impacts of violence and displacement. 

RACS’s women-only Women at Risk service responds to these needs with trauma-informed legal support delivered in a safe, confidential setting. Over the past seven years, more than 800 women have received help through this program.

Building on this expertise, RACS has created a first of its kind Safer Futures toolkit for legal, social work and interpreting professionals. The toolkit equips service providers to deliver trauma-informed support to refugee women and includes a practical checklist and a directory of services. 

Read the stories of two women, Alsana and Aisha, who received life-changing help through the Women at Risk program.

Where power doesn’t reside: women in Australian criminal trials

Professor Jill Hunter

Gender discrimination in criminal courts often operates in subtle but systemic ways. Professor Hunter’s research uncovers how these hidden dynamics shape judicial authority, jury representation and access to justice.

Women judges report higher levels of disrespect from lawyers, greater stress and lower confidence in court leadership, which remains mostly male. They also remain underrepresented on higher courts, where key legal decisions are made.

Women jurors face similar barriers. They are disproportionately excluded through peremptory challenges and more often seek excusal due to limited support. Fewer women serve on juries, and those who do are less likely to become forepersons or lead deliberations.

Professor Hunter’s work exposes how deeply embedded this discrimination is, despite decades of reform. She also challenges the myth that juries reflect the community, showing that gender and race, including First Nations identity, are routinely filtered out. This has serious consequences, especially given that women — and First Nations women in particular — are more likely to be victims of family, intimate partner and sexual violence. In these hidden ways, criminal courts can become yet another barrier to protecting women.

Nature’s Leading Women

UNSW Centre for Sustainable Development Reform

The UNSW Centre for Sustainable Development Reform (CSDR) is working to strengthen women’s leadership in global climate and biodiversity governance. Through Nature’s Leading Women, the Centre helps turn lived experience into evidence-informed reform.

Climate change affects women and girls across the Asia Pacific more severely, yet they remain excluded from decision-making. Women make up less than 34 per cent of climate negotiating teams, only 0.2 per cent of overseas climate finance goes to women-led initiatives, and just 5 per cent of Indigenous funding reaches Indigenous women. Without women’s full participation, climate and biodiversity solutions are less effective.

As the knowledge partner for Nature’s Leading Women, led by The Nature Conservancy, CSDR developed the NLW Action Agenda, a nine-point plan calling for gender-balanced delegations, more inclusive negotiation spaces, mentoring for emerging women leaders, dedicated funding streams, and innovative finance designed by women. The goal is to transform how women participate in and lead global environmental governance. 

Nature’s Leading Women has grown from a gathering of 30 women in 2017 to a network of more than 60 leaders across 12 countries. CSDR has translated participants’ experiences into evidence for global policy, producing the Action Agenda and a forthcoming peer-reviewed publication. The initiative shows how coproduced knowledge can shape both academic work and international negotiations.

Responsible AI and gender justice

Professor Mimi Zou

AI shapes everyday decisions, yet women’s perspectives are often missing. Professor Mimi Zou focuses on uncovering structural bias in AI and building systems that are fair, transparent and accountable.

Over the past six months, she has led a cross-disciplinary UNSW team on a major Responsible AI project with AMP. The work aims to ensure that emerging technologies, especially AI, are designed and governed in ways that support fair and accessible justice for all women and girls. By centring women’s voices in AI design and oversight, these partnerships challenge structural bias and open pathways for women to lead AI innovation.

Through her research and industry collaborations, including the UNSW–AMP partnership, Professor Zou develops principles and frameworks that strengthen transparency, accountability and equity in organisational AI use. Her work addresses biases that disproportionately affect women, and reinforces safeguards against exclusion and harm. 

Campus sexual violence and access to justice in Indonesia

Jessica Vincentia Marpaung

Structural barriers that limit women’s access to justice sit at the centre of Jessica’s research. Universities are often imagined as progressive spaces, yet for women experiencing sexual violence, they can also be sites of silence, procedural complexity and unequal power. In Indonesia, where regulating campus sexual violence remains politically sensitive and uneven, balancing the scales is not a single outcome but an ongoing and fragile process shaped by resistance and compromise. 

Jessica’s research examines how universities shape survivors’ access to justice by translating women’s rights into institutional practice. Using a feminist socio-legal approach, she analyses how campus sexual violence regulations are implemented in ways that can either reproduce inequality or create room for more survivor-centred responses, while remaining attentive to the limits of legal reform itself.

Coercive control and children’s experiences

Carolyn Jones, Youth Law Australia

Children are too often overlooked in assessments of coercive control. Youth Law Australia (YLA), an affiliated centre at UNSW Law & Justice, provides child-informed advice to ensure that children’s safety and experiences are recognised in law and policy.

Risk assessment of coercive control has ignored or minimised the lived experiences of children and young people. In gender-based domestic and family violence contexts, children can be used as instruments of control via manipulation, surveillance, or threats, but their conceptualisation of the harm they are experiencing may not be explored. There is also growing recognition of how coercive control is used to undermine safe relationships for children. Services must ensure that they provide children and young people with opportunities to define risk, while also ensuring that sabotage of relationships with a protective caregiver is recognised.

YLA has engaged in systemic advocacy informed by our individual client experiences. Following the passage of the standalone coercive control offence in NSW in 2022, YLA has provided child-rights-informed guidance as a member of the NSW Coercive Control Implementation and Evaluation Taskforce’s Children and Youth and Legal Reference Groups. YLA has also provided advice on coercive control offences and assessing risk for children and young people to Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments, ANROWS, and since 2024 as a member of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia’s Family Violence Reference Group.

Legal support for students experiencing gender-based violence

Sarah Loewy, Youth Law Australia

Many students do not know where to go for help. Youth Law Australia is working to strengthen legal support across the sector and is advocating for a dedicated gender-based violence legal service so students can access clear information and meaningful protections.

Gender based violence is a systemic and preventable issue in Australian higher education. It disproportionately affects women and nonbinary people and undermines students’ safety, wellbeing and educational outcomes. The 2021 National Student Safety Survey found that 4.5 per cent of students had experienced sexual assault since starting university, yet most did not make a formal report, often because they did not know what processes or supports existed. Governments and universities have increasingly recognised that this imbalance of power, information and access must be addressed.

Over the past two years, Youth Law Australia, an affiliated centre at UNSW Law & Justice, has worked with the Tasmanian University Student Association, the University of Melbourne Student Union and the National Student Legal Service Network to improve legal support for students who have experienced gender-based violence. This includes sector-wide education on legislative reforms, engagement with the National Student Ombudsman and advocacy for a dedicated GBV student legal service. By improving accountability, legal literacy and responses that centre victim survivors, this work helps balance the scales for students navigating harm. 

Gender, work and the care economy

Dr Angela Kintominas

Dr Angela Kintominas investigates how inequality in paid and unpaid care work is shaped by the law. Her teaching encourages students to think critically about how legal reforms can help rebalance the scales. 

Her research examines how legally entrenched gender discrimination continues to drive inequality linked to gender, class, race and visa status, especially in the world of work. She also looks at how society values, organises and funds both paid and unpaid care work, which has historically been associated with women. Drawing on feminist theory, she explores how we might restructure this essential “women’s work” in ways that are fairer for everyone.

She is currently analysing how the Gender Undervaluation Priority Awards Review and changes to multiemployer enterprise bargaining can support equal pay for work of equal or comparable value and reduce gender-based undervaluation. In the classroom, she encourages students to question how law entrenches inequality at work and how it can also be a tool for change, examining issues such as flexible work, parental leave, domestic and family violence leave and the right to disconnect. 

Strengthening system responses to domestic and family violence

Dr Emma Buxton-Namisnyk and Dr Althea Gibson

Dr Buxton-Namisnyk and Dr Gibson’s research examines how systems respond to domestic and family violence, aiming to strengthen risk assessment, accountability and victim-survivor safety, and address the structural drivers of gendered violence in NSW. 

Domestic and family violence disproportionately affects women in Australia: one in four has experienced partner violence, one is killed every eight days, and one in three men reports using partner violence. ‘Balance the Scales’ focuses on tackling these drivers so women can live safe, violence-free lives.

They are leading several key projects, including NSW’s first common risk assessment framework, mapping service contact before homicides (Emma), and investigating the criminalisation of women’s resistance to violence (Althea and Emma). 

Reimagining gender justice at the International Criminal Court

Scientia Professor Louise Chappell and Suzanne Varrell

The research addresses critical gaps in how the International Criminal Court (ICC) adjudicates sexual and gender-based crimes. Through feminist re-judgments, the work reconsiders how international criminal law can better deliver gender justice. 

There is a significant gap in ICC research: the contribution of judges to the ICC’s poor conviction record for sexual and gender-based crimes, and their application of gender-sensitive judging more broadly. New knowledge is required to support judges, legal experts and scholars to improve accountability for sexual and gender-based crimes and strengthen a gender-sensitive approach to adjudication.

Feminist Judgments: Reimagining the International Criminal Court, edited by Kcasey McLoughlin, Rosemary Grey, Louise Chappell and Suzanne Varrall, was published in November 2025 as the culmination of a multi-year research project. The book rewrites a range of ICC decisions using a gender justice lens and demonstrates how the ICC can apply its mandate to achieve justice for all. 

Integrating gender equity into ocean governance

Global Ocean Accounts Partnership

Global Ocean Accounts Partnership (GOAP) is working with coastal nations to ensure women’s contributions to ocean livelihoods are counted, recognised and reflected in policy. By embedding gender equity into national ocean data systems, the project addresses structural inequalities in marine governance.

Women in coastal communities are central to ocean livelihoods (including fish processing, care work and sustaining community life). Yet their contributions are largely invisible in official data systems. When women’s work goes uncounted, it goes unrecognised, and policies designed without them fail to address their needs. In small island and developing states such as the Maldives, Belize, Mozambique and Costa Rica, this data gap limits women’s access to permits, resources and decision-making power.

GOAP is developing national-level data frameworks that integrate gender equity and social inclusion into ocean governance for the first time. GOAP has been working with governments and coastal communities in Belize, Costa Rica, the Maldives and Mozambique to build frameworks that capture who depends on the ocean, how, and on whose terms. Through locally led consultations with communities, stakeholders and decision-makers, the project ensures women’s contributions are countable, comparable and embedded in policy processes.