The Legal Architecture of Equality: Analyzing Policy Gaps and the Quest for Comprehensive Gender Justice

Abstract

This paper critically examines the legal architecture of equality, moving beyond conventional binary understandings of gender discrimination to assess the efficacy and completeness of existing socio-legal frameworks in achieving comprehensive gender justice. While significant strides have been made through equality legislation and rights-based movements, this analysis contends that current legal and policy structures suffer from critical policy gaps rooted in an incomplete application of intersectional theory and an overreliance on models of redress that primarily address historical female disadvantage without adequately capturing the spectrum of contemporary gendered harms.
The study employs a critical socio-legal methodology to analyze policy areas such as domestic violence legislation, parental leave and childcare, military conscription laws, and educational equity initiatives. Specifically, it investigates instances where policies, designed to promote equality, inadvertently create differential burdens or neglect forms of systemic disadvantage experienced by diverse populations, including ethnic minority men, non-binary individuals, and men encountering traditional role constraints (e.g., in family court proceedings).
The findings suggest that the quest for true equality is often hindered by legal essentialism—the assumption that a single, unified experience of "gender" exists. The paper concludes by arguing for a paradigm shift toward a truly gender-inclusive policy framework that systematically maps and mitigates disadvantage for all gender identities. This requires legal reform that embraces proactive universalist principles and disaggregates gender identity from historical power imbalances, ensuring that the legal architecture serves as a genuine foundation for comprehensive gender justice rather than merely reinforcing partial and incomplete solutions.