Toward Substantive Equality: A Feminist Critique of the Notion of Difference in the Canadian and South African Equality Tests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Difference is implicitly measured against a standaro of ‘normality’ which upon closer inspection reveals the traits of society's dominant group — white Christian heterosexual able-bodied men. Those falling short of this benchmark are outcast as ‘different’. Although feminists long critiqued the hegemony of this standard, it was with limited success. In the early 1990's, however Martha Minow inspired a paradigm shift of our perception of difference, principally recognizing that difference is not fixed in the sense that it belongs to someone, but is variable, dependent on the comparator groups under review and the perspective of the person naming the difference. This theoretical leap has profound consequences for a substantive reading of equality. And yet the South African and Canadian courts have been slow to apply it to their equality jurisprudence. This paper examines the Canadian and South African equality tests and some of their more recent case law, concluding that the absence of a relational construction of difference perpetuates a formal application of equality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.080 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".