Sex discrimination

“ For the purposes of the present Convention, the term "discrimination against women" shall mean any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field. ”

“ We have never held that workplace harassment, even harassment between men and women, is automatically discrimination because of sex merely because the words used have sexual content or connotations. "The critical issue, Title VII's text indicates, is whether members of one sex are exposed to disadvantageous terms or conditions of employment to which members of the other sex are not exposed." ”

“ Although the District Court's version of Title VII liability is improper under any of today's opinions, I think it important to stress that Title VII creates no independent cause of action for sex stereotyping. Evidence of use by decisionmakers of sex stereotypes is, of course, quite relevant to the question of discriminatory intent. The ultimate question, however, is whether discrimination caused the plaintiff's harm. ”

“ This Act makes explicit that existing Federal statutes prohibiting sex discrimination in employment (including in access to healthcare, housing, education, credit, and jury service also prohibit sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. (15) LGBTQ people often face discrimination when seeking to rent or purchase housing, as well as in every other aspect of obtaining and maintaining housing. ”

“ No one contends, however, that sex must be the sole cause of a decision before there is a Title VII violation. This is a separate question from whether consideration of sex must be a cause of the decision. Under the accepted approach to causation that I have discussed, sex is a cause for the employment decision whenever, either by itself or in combination with other factors it made a difference to the decision. Discrimination need not be the sole cause in order for liability to arise, but merely a necessary element of the set of factors that caused the decision, i.e., a but-for cause. ”

“ That stigmatizing injury, and the denial of equal opportunities that accompanies it, is surely felt as strongly by persons suffering discrimination on the basis of their sex as by those treated differently because of their race. ”

“ It may be broadly described as a movement which seeks to remove all discrimination based on sex. It is a movement to secure recognition of an equality of the two sexes. The feminists variously demand that woman be recognized as the equal of man (1) biologically, (2) politically, (3) economically. ”

“ Legislation to apply the principle of equal pay for equal work without discrimination because of sex is a matter of simple justice. ”

“ A large minority of women influenced by kindness and self-respect and all amiable qualities, do not exercise any of these iniquitous sex-privileges at all.
If an insignificant minority of women are oppressed by individual men, it is merely because, from any reason, economic or other, the woman does not for a considerable time, choose to go to the Police Courts. ”

“ The mere statement of the case is its strongest argument, furnishing as it does a self-evident proposition. It is a disgrace to our democratic professions that there is yet a portion—ay, one half of our population, legally discrowned and outraged on account of a natural and necessary distinction of sex, which alters nothing in regard to moral obligations and duties, or to political rights and privileges, in the courts of justice and common sense. ”

“ In a leaflet issued by the “Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage” it is affirmed that “many laws are on the statute book which inflict injustice on Women.” We challenge this statement as an unmitigated falsehood. Its makers ought to know perfectly well that they cannot justify it. There are no laws on the statute book inflicting injustice on women as a Sex, but there are many laws inflicting injustice on men in the supposed interests of women. ”

“ Given then prevailing attitudes about the respective roles of males and females in society, it is possible that the enacting legislators did not anticipate protection of women against class-based discrimination. ”

“ The most curious of all concomitants of the legal subjection of men in England arise, first, that many men are not conscious of the real state of the law, and secondly, that a very loud-voiced minority of women, reinforced by sycophantic males, represent the law as being the apotheosis of unjust sex-privileges on the part of men. ”

“ It is natural that evolving standards of equality come to be embodied in legislation. When that occurs, courts should look to the fact of such change as a source of guidance on evolving principles of equality. In an analysis the Court today ignores, the Court reached this very conclusion when it extended heightened scrutiny to gender classifications and drew on parallel legislative developments to support that extension:
" [Over] the past decade, Congress has itself manifested an increasing sensitivity to sex-based classifications [citing examples] . ”

“ It is enough for the present to note that the pro-feminist prejudice exists and is transmuted into positive rules of law, and legal administration by the action of public opinion and the press, Parliament, judges and juries, and crystallised into statutory enactment by an active pro-feminist propaganda of sex-conscious women's righters. ”

“ This is, in effect, to deny that the interests of the two sexes can be permanently opposed, and that, however much individuals, from the fallibility of human nature, may fall short of a proper treatment of each other, there is any excuse whatever for laws and institutions, which should be based on ethical considerations, being, as they still are, discriminative against one sex. So strong indeed is the notion still that the interests of the sexes really are opposed, that any suggestion for legislation in the interests of women is met by the outcry that it is against men. ”

“ These unjust discriminations will ever remain, until the source from which they spring—the political disfranchisement of woman —shall be removed. The injustice involved in denying woman the suffrage is not confined to the disfranchised sex alone, but extends to the nation as well, in that it is deprived of the excellent service which woman might render. ”

“ Feminism had acquired in public opinion in the course of a generation, for no proposal was made at the same time to abolish the punishment of flogging so far as men were concerned. Up to this time the criminal law of England, as of other countries, made no distinction whatever between the sexes in the matter of crime and punishment, or at least no distinction based on the principle or sentiment of sex privilege. ”

“ There were, he said, several legal hardships which were of necessity inflicted on women; therefore we should not relieve them from those which are not necessary—the necessary hardships being the greater; and it being bad policy to raise in women a false expectation that the legal hardships relating to their sex were of a removable kind! ”

“ When women are denied the right to enter institutions of learning, and practice in the professions, unjust discriminations made against sex even more degrading and humiliating than were ever made against color, surely woman, too, should be protected by a civil-rights bill and a sixteenth amendment that should make her political status equal with all other citizens of the republic. ”

“ In addition to many other objections which may be urged against the common allegation that the legal disabilities of women are merely part of the tyranny of sex over sex, it is historically and philosophically valueless, as indeed are most propositions concerning classes so large as sexes. ”

“ Today, an historic number of women in Congress in a bipartisan vote—under the leadership of our historic Speaker — expressed their support for a principle in which I also deeply believe: that in the United States of America, no one’s rights should be denied on account of their sex. ”

“ And yet an enlightened and chivalrous public opinion tolerates the most fiendish barbarities and excogitated cruelties being perpetrated upon male convicts in our gaols, while it shudders with horror at the notion of female convicts being accorded any severity of punishment at all even for the same, or, for that matter, more heinous offences. A particularly crass and crucial illustration is that infamous piece of one-sided sex legislation which has already occupied our attention in the course of the present volume—to wit, the so-called “White Slave Traffic Act” 1912. ”

“ If he (or particularly if she) happens to be burning with enthusiasm for the rights of women as individuals and scornful of old-fashioned proprieties and traditions, he (or she) will most likely jump to the conclusion that the objections raised to the employment of women in the particular process are merely sex-prejudice and sex-domination. Neither the sentimentalist nor the individualist, however, sees the full bearing of the situation. ”

“ Our modern women's righters bewail the alleged legal oppression of women by men. The facts show not that neither sex is oppressed as such, but, on the contrary, they disclose a legalised oppression of men by women. ”

“ The injudiciousness of parents, a youth's own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women ”

“ There were many legal qualifications designed to help women evade the strict letter of the law when this, if enforced absolutely, would work injustice. Ignorance of the law, if there was no criminal offence involving good morals, was particularly accepted in the case of women "on account of the weakness of the sex." ”

“ That, as the Constitution of the United States expressly declares that "no State shall make or enforce any law that shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," those provisions of the several State Constitutions that exclude women from the franchise on account of sex, are violative alike of the spirit and letter of the Federal Constitution. ”

“ And however it may have been at the outset, we think the Woman's Rights question has now made good its title to be heard in the superior court. The principles involved in this great question we can not now discuss; but we have a few thoughts upon the attitude of the reformer toward society, which we would respectfully commend to attention. If the female sex is injured in its present position, it is an injury growing out of universal mistake; an honest error, in which the sexes have conspired, without intentional injustice on one side, or feeling of wrong on the other. ”

“ But even to this day, the United States has still not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. Women in the United States still face systematic, broad and institutional discrimination, with shocking overt and covert gender discrimination in various forms. ”

“ If, because of their sex, men demand privileges, rights, emoluments, honors, opportunities and freedom, which they claim as good for and necessary to them and their welfare, while they insist that all these are not to be allowed to women—would be her damnation—are not these, also, sex maniacs? Has not humanity been long enough cursed by so degrading and degraded, so ignorant and so fatally wrong a mental, moral, social and legal outlook? ”

“ The organized feminist movement in England and America has concerned itself pretty exclusively with securing political rights for women; that is to say, its conception of freedom has been based on the eighteenth century misconception of it as a matter of suffrage. Women have won the vote, and now they are proceeding to use their new political power to secure the removal of those legal discriminations which still remain in force against their sex. This is well enough; it is important that the State should be forced to renounce its pretension to discriminate against women in favour of men. ”

“ The outcry is led by self-styled upholders of equality between the sexes, the apostles of the positive side of Feminism, who bien entendu claim the eradication of sex boundaries in political and social life on the ground of women being of equal capacity with men, but who, when moral responsibility is in question, conveniently fall back on a sentiment, the only conceivable ground for which is to be found in the time-honoured theory of the mental and moral weakness of the female sex. ”

“ Is what the authors of the leaflet may possibly have in their mind (if they have anything at all) when they talk about statutes inflicting [114] injustice on women, that the law does not carry sex vindictiveness against men far enough to please them? With all its flogging, penal servitude, hard labour and the rest, for offences against women, some of them of a comparatively trivial kind, does the law as regards severity on men not even yet satisfy the ferocious Feminist souls of the members of the “Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage”? ”

“ It is quite true that some Feminists, when hard pressed, may grudgingly concede the untenability on rational grounds of the Sentimental Feminists' claims. But taken as a whole, and in their practical dealings, the Political Feminists are in accord with the Sentimental Feminists in claiming female immunity on the ground of sex. This is shown in every case where a female criminal receives more than a nominal sentence. ”