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| 11 May 2026 | |
| Written by Barbara Hoffman | |
| 2026 Alumnae Award Recipients |
In her final year at MLC School, Ramona Vijeyarasa (1999) was the Captain of Mooramoora, a member of the Debating team, came 4th in the State for Business Studies in the HSC, and received the Premier’s Trophy for Excellence for achieving over 90% in 11 Units.
Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa is now the Faculty of Law’s inaugural Chair in Gender and the Law at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the founder and Chief Investigator of the Gender Legislative Index, an innovative tool that benchmarks domestic legislation against international legal standards using a combination of expert human evaluation and machine learning. Her research sits at the intersection of gender equality, law reform and emerging technologies, with a strong focus on real‑world impact.
Professor Vijeyarasa has held visiting and research appointments at the University of Oxford’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, the European University Institute, and Ruhr University Bochum’s Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict. Her work is globally comparative and informed by extensive experience across diverse legal, political and social contexts.
An award‑winning scholar, teacher and widely read public commentator, Professor Vijeyarasa has dedicated her professional career to advancing women’s rights through law. Her research has directly shaped policy and institutional reform. In Australia, her work was instrumental in the establishment of the Tasmanian Legislative Council’s Gender and Equality Audit Committee in 2022 – the country’s first standalone parliamentary committee mandated to scrutinise legislation for its gendered impacts. Internationally, her research led to the first empirical study linking trafficking and stigma in Vietnam (2010), prompting the Vietnamese Government to recognise and address the social, psychological, health and economic consequences of stigma for returning victims of trafficking.
Professor Vijeyarasa has advised the Australian Government’s Office for Women, as well as numerous local and international non‑government organisations, on gender‑responsive lawmaking and women’s rights interventions. Her work is characterised by close engagement with policymakers, civil society and affected communities, and by a commitment to translating rigorous research into practical legal and institutional change.
She holds an LLM from New York University School of Law and a PhD and LLB/BA from the University of New South Wales. Her latest monograph, Rewriting the Rules: Gender‑Responsive Lawmaking for the Twenty‑First Century (University of California Press, 2026), advances a new framework for embedding gender equality into legislative processes. Her earlier books include The Woman President: Leadership, Law and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Sex, Slavery and the Trafficked Woman (Routledge, 2015). She has also edited International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women (2021) and authored more than forty peer‑reviewed publications on law, gender and equality.
Before joining UTS, Professor Vijeyarasa worked extensively as an international women’s rights lawyer within international organisations, non‑profits and global NGOs. Her advocacy has included supporting anti‑trafficking reintegration networks in Vietnam and Ukraine; filing briefs before the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Moldova and the Supreme Court of the Philippines; making submissions to UN treaty bodies; and overseeing research and programming on women and youth in urban contexts. This experience continues to inform her impact‑driven research approach, grounded in methodological rigour and oriented toward tangible societal change.
Professor Vijeyarasa has received numerous academic awards and fellowships. She has been a Women’s Leadership Institute Australia (WLIA) Research Fellow since 2021. In 2024, Professor Vijeyarasa won the 2024 Lyndal Taylor and Emma Holt Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and was named a Finalist for the Vice‑Chancellor’s Research Award for Research Excellence through Collaboration together with Rapido Social Impact. Her scholarship has received recognitions from the American Society of International Law (2023) in honour of excellence in international law scholarship involving women and girls, gender, and feminist approaches; and from the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law from which she won the Publication Prize in 2023. In 2022, Professor Vijeyarasa won the Women in AI Award (Law Category, 2022); and was named Runner-Up for the Women in AI Innovator of the Year Award. In 2021, she was also a runner‑up for the global Letten Prize (2021). Professor Vijeyarasa is also a former recipient of an NYU International Law and Human Rights Fellowship.
Her research has attracted competitive funding from the Australian Research Council, government agencies, philanthropic organisations and the academy. Current and recent grants include a 3-year collaboration of $2.5 million with the Minderoo Foundation on advancing gender equality through the law (2026 – 2028); an ARC Discovery Project Auditing the Auditors as lead Chief Investigator (2025 – 2027), alongside funding from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and UTS‑based research impact schemes.
Professor Vijeyarasa is a regular contributor to public debate on gender equality and law, with commentary appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Conversation, and on ABC Radio. She has lived and worked on every inhabitable continent.
University of Technology Sydney: Appointments
