JUSTIFYING WOMEN'S POVERTY: CHALLENGING CONSTITUTIONAL PERMISSIBILITY OF WOMEN'S POVERTY

ABSTRACT

If women have a right to equality, why do courts keep holding that it is constitutionally justified to pursue laws that entrench women's poverty? This lecture seeks to answer this question by exploring the mechanics of justifying infringements of rights in the context of women's poverty. It argues that justification concepts are misappropriated and misused to trivialize the harms of gendered economic inequality and to inflate the strengths of neoliberal logic. Through enriching justification criteria with women's substantive equality, the lecture explores how any arguments that women's poverty is justified are not illogical, implausible, unfair or rooted in patriarchal attitudes and systems.