Pregnancy and Motherhood: Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination in the Canadian Workplace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis analyses discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers in Canadian workplaces, and examines how the current legal framework is insufficient to combat harmful stereotypes surrounding motherhood that result in subtle forms of pregnancy discrimination. It argues that the parental leave policy in Canada has, by failing to disrupt the gendered patterns of parental leave taking, perpetuated traditional sex-role stereotypes that continue to impede women’s workplace equality. It suggests father targeted leave to help breakdown these gender role stereotypes, and to degenderize traditional work and family roles resulting in a more egalitarian distribution of employment and family responsibilities. This thesis proceeds in three chapters. Chapter I of this thesis traces the history of discrimination against pregnant workers. Chapter II discusses the social context that led to the emergence of contemporary legal protections available to expectant and new mothers. Chapter III examines how the parental leave policy has failed to challenge the gendered leave-taking patterns, and suggests Québec’s paternity leave program as a model for the rest of the nation to allow both parents to equally engage in parenting and paid employment, thus, achieving true gender 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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".