The Substantially Impaired Sex: Uncovering the Gendered Nature of Disability Discrimination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was a landmark piece of legislation that prohibited private-sector employers from discriminating against qualified disabled workers. Although the Act is over a quarter-century old, legal scholars have never considered whether the Act has been uniformly efficacious — that is, whether the Act has served all subpopulations of disabled workers equally well. This scholarly neglect is surprising, given that prior economics research indicates that the ADA has been less effective for disabled women than for disabled men. This Article steps back and asks why the Act might have resulted in differential effects for men and women. The ADA provides precisely the same remedies for qualified disabled workers, without taking workers’ sex into account. The Act’s approach assumes that disability discrimination is the same (or highly similar) both in nature and in strength for men and women, but this Article questions that assumption. An empirical examination of all ADA charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reveals a negative interaction between disability discrimination and sex: Disabled workers who are in the minority sex within their workplaces are more likely to encounter discrimination than are disabled workers who are in the majority sex. Because many more industries are majority-male than majority-female, the result of this sex-disability interaction is higher overall rates of disability discrimination against women. Using this empirical evidence, the Article concludes that if disabled women are ever to achieve an equivalent legal remedy for disability discrimination to disabled men, courts must no longer ignore the exacerbating effects of sex discrimination on disability discrimination. Indeed, the case of disabled women highlights the need for courts to reform judicially created proof structures in employment discrimination cases, which — although already the object of much scholarly scrutiny — are particularly unworkable for disabled women.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".