The Rights of Women in Comparative Constitutional Law

Irene Spigno, Valentina Rita Scotti, & Janaína Lima Penalva da Silva

University of Coahuila, European Law and Governance School of the European Public Law Organization in Athens & University of Brasília

Tell us a little bit about the book.

Through a comparative analysis involving 13 countries from Africa, America, Asia and Europe, the book aims at assessing women’s equality at the global level. It focuses on formal constitutional provisions as well as on the substantial level of protection women’s equality has achieved in the systems analysed. It looks at the relevant gender-related legislation, the participation of women in the institutional arena and the constitutional interpretation made by constitutional justices on gender issues. Furthermore, it highlights women’s contribution in their roles as judges, MPs, activists and academics, thus increasing the visibility of their participation in the public sphere. Finally, the book tries to innovate in the field by proposing a research project based on a common methodology able to provide a global overview about the social, economic, political, regulatory and jurisprudential phenomena that explain the reasons for the specific level of protection of women’s rights within the analysed legal systems.

What inspired you to take up this project?

We were already working on gender-related issues when we met at the 2018 IACL World Congress in Seoul and the Executive Committee encouraged us to establish a Research Group focused on ‘Gender and Constitutions’. This seemed to us a great opportunity to create a more solid research network able to connect all the colleagues and friends we were already working with in this field and to produce more impactful contributions. Hence, we established the group and began to discuss its first research activity. An assessment of the state of women’s equality seemed the most obvious starting point, particularly because we were aware that only a few studies had attempted to catalogue the different approaches adopted by constitutional systems as far as women’s rights are concerned.

Whose work was influential on you throughout the project?

In a 2004 edited collection’ ‘The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence’, Beverly Baines and Ruth Rubio Marin encouraged scholars to produce research able to ‘think about constitutions in a gendered way’. We tried to do so in this book. Of course, we were influenced also by the feminist scholarship that has many times underscored the need for a more mature legal reflection on gender discrimination, able to keep the benefits of the interdisciplinary research interconnecting legal studies with the other humanities, but at the same time conducted with a solid legal methodology. In this regard, we were inspired by our mentors, who since our respective Ph.D. studies insisted on the need to firmly respect the methodology even when the topic you are dealing with is very sensitive and touches you personally.

What challenges did you face in writing the book?

Editing a book that involves so many authors is not an easy task. You need to deal with practical issues, such as the different time-zones when you organize research meetings and to coordinate the availability of all the involved authors. Besides, there are the more consistent research-related issues: how to define the common methodology? Which margins of flexibility should we allow to authors in order to give a picture of the country-specific context? Is it methodologically correct to write country-based chapters or should we structure the collection focusing each chapter on a hot topic? At the beginning, we had more questions than answers, but we were also working with an incredible team of outstanding scholars who attended the workshops we organized as touchstones for the research and immensely contributed to finding answers.

What do you hope to see as the book’s contribution to academic discourse and constitutional or public law more broadly?

We hope the book can contribute to keeping alive the debate on the protection of women’s rights. In present times, we often observe that certain rights are increasingly taken for granted and that there is a reluctance to face the violations of rights women are exposed to with the most opportune tools, as the number of femicides demonstrates. Furthermore, as the book shows, there is a tendency in transitional countries as well as in consolidated democracy to resort to a populist discourse grounded on gender complementarity in times of economic uncertainty and political instability. We believe that the book can underscore these current flaws and pave the way for further research on the potential solutions, which we hint at in the book’s conclusions.

What’s next?

Beside our personal publishing and teaching activities, as the chairs of the IACL Research Group ‘Gender and Constitutions’ we are now planning a new research project involving the group’s members, which we hope will result in an edited book, and we continue to organize workshops and seminars on gender-related topics.

Irene Spigno is General Director of the Inter-American Academy of Human Rights of the Autonomous University of Coahuila, Mexico.

Valentina Rita Scotti is Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law at the European Law and Governance School of the European Public Law Organization in Athens, Greece.

Janaína Lima Penalva da Silva is Associate Professor at the Law School of the University of Brasília and Coordinator of its Center of Studies of Inequality and Discrimination.

For more information on the book, and to purchase, click here.