Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa

Ramona Vijeyarasa is the architect of the Gender Legislative Index, the first comprehensive IT-based tool to make legislation better for women. Her work innovatively combines law, engineering and data science to show how the law can work more effectively to improve women’s lives and mitigate gender inequality.

Before joining academia, Ramona worked for several international and domestic organisations on women’s rights issues. The experiences of a decade of activism – from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, where she listened to the stories of survivors of domestic violence; to the floating villages of Cambodia, where she supported women’s demands for better access to reproductive health care; from cassava plantations in the outskirts of Monrovia; to reintegration centres for exploited migrants in Ukraine – are still present in all her research, which aims to deliver practical solutions to real-life problems. In a personal capacity, Ramona still advises pro bono several organisations in Australia and overseas working on health, migration and women’s rights.

Ramona was the 2020 Women’s Leadership Institute Australia Research Fellow and has been honoured with grants and awards from (among others) the New York University School of Law, the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She has lived and worked on every (inhabitable) continent.