(How) Can Gender Equality Rights be Protected after Brexit?

The prospect of ‘hard Brexit’ raises the possibility that the UK’s equality legislation as codified in the Equality Act 2010 could disappear after a bridging period when rights would presumably be protected. This possibility is not the most likely hypothesis as the equality architecture created or brought together by the 2010 Act will lobby hard for the maintenance or introduction of a domestically derived corpus of equality rights. However it raises fundamental questions about the basis of equality legislation, its relationship to wider international norms and regulations, and the capacity of domestic actors to mobilise and pressurise government to retain not just direct equality legislation but indirect provisions which have either been eroded in recent years or frontally contested.