The Role of Dignity in Canadian and South African Gender Equality Jurisprudence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the use of dignity in the formation of tests for gender equality in the constitutional jurisprudence of Canada and South Africa. Recent gender equality cases in both countries are reviewed and considered in light of various critiques of the notion that dignity is a concept capable of underlying equality and determining instances of discrimination. A comparison between Canadian and South African commentators reveals many of the same concerns about a dignity-centered test for equality, concerns which often transcend national boundaries apply with equal force to gender equality cases in the other jurisdiction. While courts in both countries have expressed a preference for a substantive as opposed to formal approach to equality, and have focused on dignity in order to avoid entrenching pre-existing disadvantage through uniform treatment, it is argued that too great a focus on dignity has itself obscured considerations of group disadvantage and contributed to the very formalism dignity was supposed to overcome. Equating discrimination with violations of dignity has not furthered women’s rights in either country, and has instead gone some way towards undermining them, suggesting that courts in Canada and South Africa should move away from dignity in formulating and applying a test for equality.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".