Gender, Religion and Workplace : Reimagining Reasonable Accommodation

Authors: 
Title: 
Gender, Religion and Workplace : Reimagining Reasonable Accommodation
Journal Citation: 
20(2) CANADIAN LABOUR AND EMPLOYMENT LAW JOURNAL, 307-338 (2017)

The author asserts that there is a climate of growing xenophobia and Islamophobia reflected in the legislative and judicial context of multiculturalism in Canada, as shown by R v N.S., the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, and the Québec Charter of Values. These initiatives, she maintains, wrongly cast religious freedom and gender equality as mutually exclusive concepts and reinforce the “otherness” of minority racialized women—particularly racialized Muslim women—under the pretense of secularism and gender equality. The author engages in a critical analysis of reasonable accommodation and suggests that there needs to be changes to the current framework in which minority women are accommodated as exceptions, thus leaving the structures of oppression and discrimination unchallenged. Instead, the author advocates for an approach to reasonable accommodation that promotes substantive equality, brings about structural change, and better responds to the lives of women who face discrimination along multiple axes.