The impact of relationship recognition on lesbian women in Canada: Still separate and only somewhat "equivalent"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study evaluates the impact of relationship recognition on lesbian women as a class. Two main conclusions are reached. First, all statutes that recognize lesbian and gay relationships continue to discriminate against them in many ways. Second, extending spousal treatment to lesbian and gay couples for federal income taxation, social assistance and retirement programs will result in disproportionately higher taxes and reduced social benefits for those lesbian and gay couples with the lowest incomes. Using microsimulation, those new costs are projected to be in the order of $130 million to $155 million in 2000, while new fiscal benefits of relationship recognition are only about $10 million to $15 million. These costs fall most heavily on lesbian women and on low-income gay couples. As women, lesbian women are heavily disadvantaged by their gender, and this disadvantage is further compounded by the effects of sexuality, race, disability, age and family responsibility. Using low-income cutoffs, family income concepts, the tax on marriage and presumed economies of scale to limit low-income assistance turns relationship recognition into a way to increase the total tax load on low-income couples. The solutions recommended in this study include eliminating all remaining forms of discrimination in federal law on the basis of sexuality and shifting from the use of the couple as the basic unit of tax/transfer policy to the use of the individual as the basic policy unit. These steps, when combined with the extension of employee family benefits and tax provisions relating to non-conjugal couples, and the repeal of tax/transfer benefits for the support of economically dependent able-bodied adults, will eliminate much of the regressivity of the tax/transfer system at lower income levels. Enhancing the progressivity of the total tax system will further assist in improving the incidence of government penalties on low-income couples and households. Recommendations for enhanced data collection, protection of human rights and law reform are also made.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".