TOPIC :“Relevant of Gender in Law

making”
Name – aayat shah
Section – ‘A’
Course – B.A.LLB
Year – 1st
Session: 2019-2024
Contents

1. Why are law & justice important for gender equality.

2 What are the common areas of concern for women

in the field of law and justice

2. Gender equality
Introduction
1. Why are law & justice important for gender equality?
Law is pervasive and affects many aspects of people’s lives, women and men alike. As we
witness the growing „juridification‟ of life – that is, the expansion and penetration of the legal
sphere into more and more aspects of other social (public and private) spheres – the prominence
of law and rights in affecting people’s lives becomes increasingly obvious. Law and justice
impact people’s capacity to accumulate endowments, enjoy returns to such endowments, access
rights and resources, and act as free, autonomous agents in society. Inequalities in
endowments, access to resources and rights, social (and household) status, voice and agency
are perpetuated, codified, contested and redressed through norms and the institutions
established or resulting from such norms, be they social or legal. Although these inequalities
can affect both women and men, women are lagging behind men in many fields.

2. What are the common areas of concern for women in the field of law and
justice?
Because of the central role that law and justice institutions play in fostering or hindering gender
equality, any approach to justice reform needs to take into consideration how gender comes
into play – that is, how differences in women and men’s social, economic and legal
endowments affect the way they experience law and justice in their lives, and how their
everyday experience of law and justice simultaneously shapes patterns of social, economic and
legal endowments. Both women and men often face similar challenges in accessing justice –
such as physical distance from justice service providers, poor infrastructure, and high costs.
However, women often experience additional or different “barriers”. The lack of legal
guarantees and the existence of unequal or gender-blind legal provisions in many parts of the
world, such as in the area of labor, family, property and personal status laws hinder women’s
access to justice. Furthermore, women’s ability to access justice mechanisms, such as courts,
legal aid clinics, and administrative bodies, can also be limited due to economic (lack of
money), social and psychological (stigma, restrictions on mobility, time constraints) and
educational (limited education, limited access to information and social networks)factors,
among others. Even when these institutions are accessed, biases, lack of gender sensitivity and
limited capacity among those that administer justice hinder women’s chances of obtaining fair
outcomes (see appendices on access to justice, on enforcement and gender equality, and on
courts and the judiciary). In some countries, structures able to effectively respond to gender
equality concerns are limited. The cumulative effect of these factors is often the creation of a
gender inequality trap. The complexity of dynamics between justice and the gender inequality
trap, however, is even more subtle. Gender discrimination often starts in the household, the
most immediate of the social arenas wherein an individual defines his or her identity. In
addition, cultural, social and religious perceptions of gender roles are often ingrained and
accepted by both men and women who might find abstract concepts of equality and human
rights equally foreign, and perhaps even threatening, to an established social order in which
their role is known.
4. Gender equality and legal pluralism
In social systems which recognize more than one source of law, a situation of legal pluralism
arises. In such arenas, different legal institutions, and underlying norms coexist, reinforcing,
contradicting and complementing each other. In such societies, everyday transactions such as
marriage, inheritance and land exchange fall into the jurisdiction of entities ranging from the
state (sometimes at multiple levels) to customary and religious authorities applying a variety
of rules: state law, customary law, religious law and local norms. This generates the potential
for ambiguities and confusions (even outright conflict) that are, in turn, compounded by the
absence or failure of mechanisms for mediating between them. Gender relations sit squarely at
the intersection of these different, often contending, normative orders: a country may be a
signatory to an international agreement on non-discrimination against women, at the same time
that it confers authority on customary legal systems to resolve inheritance disputes that do not
recognize the claims of widows; formal religious decrees (e.g., particular forms of sharia law)
may consign women and men to different public places even as increasingly open access to the
global media inexorably challenges the normative legitimacy of such practices (or at least
heightens awareness of and sensitivity to cross-cultural differences). Common understandings
of legal systems have tended to isolate two sets: the state legal system, i.e. the set of laws and
institutions that emanate from and are enforced by the state; and non-state systems (such as
religious and customary systems), emanating from traditional sources of authority deriving
legitimacy from their social and cultural embeddedness. Orthodox approaches to justice reform
have tended to focus on state systems – with most interventions addressing court reforms such
as case management, infrastructure, trainings. More recent reforms have also engaged with
non-state systems, often as a discrete and fungible set of institutions in need of efficiency- and
norm-based reform. Such approaches fail to appreciate that legal systems do not exist in a
vacuum and that, in situations of legal pluralism, different systems continuously interact and
influence each other. As a result, dichotomies between state and non-state systems are
unhelpful: rather, a landscape of justice institutions exists, with the potential to empower or
oppress. In some cases, discrimination against women emerges not solely from any one of the
different systems, but rather from their combination. Examples from Kenya and Papua New
Guinea suggest that a holistic approach that takes into account the various norms, institutions
and stakeholders that impact the way women experience law and justice is preferable. Instead
of trying to design “the” perfect justice system, reform efforts should concentrate on providing
women the tools to navigate the complexities of the many existing systems empowering them
and making them agents, instead of passive recipients, of justice.

Conclusions
Making justice and law reform work in contexts of legal pluralism is challenging. At a basic
level, it is a question of numbers: there are simply more institutions, laws, principles, values
and actors involved. And with that goes the question of complexity: all those laws, institutions,
and actors interact with and influence each other. Making the law work to enhance gender
equality amidst such complexity might be even more challenging, as a range of international
actors and strongly-held normative principles are also involved. In order to fruitfully engage in
contexts of legal pluralism, and to capitalize on the opportunities such contexts offer,
practitioners need to be prepared to acknowledge these facts and engage accordingly. For this
we offer the following suggestions. Approaches to justice reform in legally plural contexts
should be carefully reconsidered. Not only should one shift focus from “best practice” to “best
fit” and assess the specific socio-political context, reformers should carefully map existing
processes, institutions and relevant actors and engage with them as appropriate in order to
maximize impact and minimize unintended consequences. Interventions should seek to foster
change using different entry points, including formal institutions, social movements, traditional
governance mechanisms and civil society. Building and strengthening institutions.
Interventions may capitalize on legal pluralism by revitalizing, modernizing, “engendering”
existing institutions. They apply a set of rules to deal with such situations in a particular way,
managing tensions between competing legal regimes. While no panacea (and indeed sometimes
becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution), their “hybrid” nature offers the
potential to combine desirable aspects of the “formal system” with the accessibility and social
and cultural legitimacy usually enjoyed by traditional institutions. Focus on legal
empowerment. In order to foster gender equality in a way that meaningfully engages women,
rather than reducing development interventions to a choice between systems or norms,
interventions might look to increase women options and empower women to make the choice
themselves. This could be done by simultaneously shifting women’s adaptive expectations and
reducing barriers to women’s social participation, thereby allowing them to be part of the
construction of institutions and to contest what is legitimate for a rule system to uphold.