Socio-Legal Discussion Group: Feminist Legal Methodology in Finance & AI International Law through a Risk-Based Approach
Notes & Changes
The CSLS discussion group is organized by students, with each session focused on a different research topic, presented by internal or external speakers.
If you cannot attend in person, please join online via Zoom.
Title: Feminist Legal Methodology in Finance
Yaoqi Zheng, PhD candidate, Durham University Law School
Abstract: Women working in the financial industry face many unique challenges, such as unequal pay, the highest gender pay gap, a misogynist culture, and long working hours. To address these issues, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) makes a business case for promoting women, representing an idea of women’s instrumentalisation. Against this background, this research deploys feminist legal methods to examine how UK law can be improved to help women claim equal opportunities working in the financial industry and address the concerns of women’s instrumentalisation. As such, this research expands the repertoire of feminist legal scholarships by extending feminist legal methods to finance.
This research proposes a new theoretical framework, the Feminisation of Finance, to categorise women’s interactions with finance in three dimensions: ‘Women in the Workplace’, ‘Women in Management’, and ‘Women and Capital’. To illustrate, ‘Women in the Workplace’ pertains to the female workforce within the financial industry; ‘Women in Management’ focuses on female leadership in the financial sector; and ‘Women and Capital’ addresses how the financial industry (e.g., institutional investors) can be better incentivised to address the problems of women’s instrumentalisation.
Building upon this framework, this research deploys the public and private dichotomy to examine how the long working hours in finance and childcaring responsibilities combined produce gendered effects for women working in the financial industry. These issues are closely related to ‘women in the workplace’ and ‘women in management’ dimensions. Additionally, this research deploys intersectionality to examine the financial regulations and their silence on women with ethnic backgrounds, aiming to reconcile their different interests. This aspect relates to the ‘women and capital’ dimension of the Feminisation of Finance framework.
Title: “The Formation of Artificial Intelligence International Law: From the Perspective of Risk-based Approach”
YU Liyuan, PhD candidate, Peking University Law School
Abstract: The dynamic formation of international law on artificial intelligence follows a multi-layered trajectory, moving from soft law to hard law, regional to international, and from domestic to extraterritorial applications. From the perspective of the risk-based approach, this presentation identifies a global convergence towards this concept and explores its implications by comparative international law. As the arguments of comparative international law reveal, international law is not uniformly understood, interpreted, applied, and approached by different national and international actors, particularly in light of changes in geopolitical power. This presentation identifies and analyses similarities and differences in the risk-based approaches adopted by different jurisdictions, notably the EU, US and China. It hypothesises that variations in national approaches to risk classification highlight potential conflict of laws and challenges in international law-making. This presentation concludes that the EU’s risk-based approach not only paves the way for the resurgence of the Brussels effect but also serves as a cornerstone for transnational dialogues.