... to foster, nurture and legitimate unequal relations within this sphere; the assumption being that if it can aid one extreme, it can also aid another. However, there are two subsequent questions to be asked from an acknowledgement of the law's ability to promote equality and the first deals with the extent to which legal policy can actually change the status quo in any given society. If the law is seen as a reflection of social and cultural mores, the power to achieve equality of the sexes should then chiefly reside in the institutions which espouse those social and cultural beliefs and not law itself. Or, it could be said that it is only if the law works in tandem with these social institutions, each bolstering the other that change may come about. Thus, legal policy does have the power to promote gender equality - a telling choice of word. It may ...

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