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 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 | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".