Qualitative Data Analysis at UTS series

'The Gender Legislative Index: Lessons in going from data coding to creating an index for women'

This is the eighth session in the ten-part series: Qualitative Data Analysis at UTS. The aim of this series is to showcase and celebrate the diverse and innovative ways UTS researchers are working with qualitative data.

In this session Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa, Faculty of Law, will talk through her experience in the creation of the Gender Legislative Index*.

Qualitative research often requires big budgets and long periods to conduct interviews and collect supplementary data. Sometimes, however, we already have the data at hand, but the challenge is making sense of it. This requires not only processing the data, but first and foremost, knowing what is your ultimate goal and using that goal to shape the way you interrogate the data. Your specific goal may even require you to design your own qualitative methodology. In this session, Ramona will offer participants tips based on her experience in identifying and responding to a concrete gap in knowledge, managing a large amount of data, designing a sound methodology and setting up the necessary collaborations to actually create the Gender Legislative Index platform.

Back in 2017, while there were many global gender indices in the world, few, if any, could concretely tell us whether specific aspects of a law were good for women. The GLI, an almost fully-functional tool today, was developed to perform this task. Ramona tested it on 97 laws from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines and over 30 laws from Australia, while other stakeholders are looking into applying the methodology in some Pacific Island-States. The interface has become a public resource for advancing gender equality globally and it is being used by legislators and civil society across the world to advance women's rights.

In this workshop, Ramona goes back to basics and returns to the GLI’s starting point: a qualitative analysis of a large body of UN and specifically women's rights materials. In this session, Ramona will talk through the process of codifying and analysing the 37 General Recommendations issued by the CEDAW Committee and the lessons she learnt in converting that data and her analysis into a new legal index.

* please note, this session will be recorded.