Must Feminists Support Entrenchment of Sex Equality? Lessons from Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION Must feminists support entrenchment of sex equality? Although an affirmative response might appear self-evident, recent events in the Canadian province of Quebec might give feminists pause. The issue was not whether the province should entrench its first sex equality provision; the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (“Quebec Charter”) prohibited sex discrimination from its inception in 1975. Tensions arose among Quebec feminists over the proposal to add a second sex equality provision to the Quebec Charter. They did not articulate their tensions in terms of competing visions of sex equality: discrimination versus equality. Instead, the dominant theme was conflicting constitutional rights: sex equality versus religious freedom. Accordingly, an analysis of Quebec's experience may be instructive for feminists who are interested in issues of constitutional design in other jurisdictions. In what follows I describe the constitutional setting, the origins of the proposed amendment to the Quebec Charter, and the tensions it exposed among feminists in Quebec. Although they disagreed over the all-or-nothing question of whether to entrench the second sex equality provision, I approach the issue of constitutional design from a different perspective, namely that sex equality provisions serve multiple functions. I argue that Ayelet Shachar's theory of joint governance illuminates the identity of feminists who are not served by Quebec's proposal, because they require a sex equality provision that protects intersectionality. After reviewing how such a provision might be designed, I suggest nevertheless that this second function could be performed by Quebec's amendment.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".