Legal and Biological Perspectives on Employment Testing for Physical Abilities: A Post-Meiorin Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the course of defending women’s right to employment opportunities in physically demanding jobs traditionally held by men, feminists have often pointed out that many exceptional women possess physical abilities similar to men’s. However, if women only deserve access to physically demanding jobs to the extent that they possess the physical abilities of men, only a very small minority of women will ever occupy these jobs. Does the fact that most women are less strong and have a smaller aerobic capacity than men mean that most women should indeed be excluded from physically demanding jobs traditionally done by men? Relying on a substantive rather than a formal model of equality, we argue that the answer to this question is no.We find support for this position in the 1999 Supreme Court of Canada decision in the Meiorin case. In this ruling, the Court underlined the excessive nature of many physical selection standards. In addition, the Court recognized the importance of human-task interaction in determining whether a worker can successfully perform her or his duties.Until recently, human rights law allowed employment standards that produced adverse effect discrimination on women to remain in place, as long as an employer accommodated - up to the point of undue hardship- any individual who complained of this discrimination. But in Meiorin, the Supreme Court ruled that the standards governing the performance of work should be designed from the outset to reflect differences between women and men. This modification to human rights law has the potential to significantly improve women’s employment opportunities in physically demanding jobs traditionally held by men. Unfortunately, this modification has not translated into any changes to guidelines for establishing employment equity programs. The authors, who have expertise in law and in ergonomics, present several case studies demonstrating the types of workplace changes that are necessary to accommodate the majority of women
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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 | 0.020 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.025 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".