Foreword

• Pages: 9-14

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Foreword

Kim Brooks1

We invoke ideas of equal ity regu larly in our daily lives. We talk about

whether we are being treated equally by our parents relative to our siblings;

whether equality requi res the number of women who sit in parliament or

on corporate boards to be increased; whether it is an unjustied inequality

if corporate executives are paid more than  times the salary of nurses; or

whether (if there are two parents) both should take equal leaves from their

jobs when they have children. A ll of these kinds of di scussions invoke our

sense of equality, or at least our sense of what might constitute equal treat-

ment. Yet most of us , when pressed, nd it dicult to delineate precisely

what we mean by equality, and certainly we nd it hard to de ne, exactly

what equality is in a succinct statement.

Ruthann Robson, an American legal theorist and author, tells a thought-

provoking story about students in her law class g rappling with their intui-

tive sense that tells them when a decision is discrimi natory. She posits a

hiring decision at a law rm: in justifying not hiring a potential candidate ,

the employer decides the candidate is dressed inappropriately. e students

in Robson’s class are then presented with dierent descriptions of the can-

didate’s attire and charged with determin ing whether the hiri ng decision

was discriminatory. If they are told that the candidate was wearing a sari or

a yarmulke, most students quickly conclude that discrimination is at play.

If they are told t hat the candidate was a man wearing a dress, or a woman

wearing a man’s suit, they typically pause for some time, but ultimately

many of them think that the decision not to hire constitutes discri mina-