The Court of the 2nd Court of Public Finance of the Capital granted, on Tuesday (7/05), the urgent protection requested by the Public Ministry of Paraíba (MPPB) and determined that it be guaranteed to candidates registered in the competition for training soldiers of the Military Police and the Fire Department of Paraíba, able to take the physical fitness test, a reduction of one second in the running time. As a result, the maximum time for female candidates to complete this test will be 19 seconds and no longer 17 seconds. The decision was made in response to Public Civil Action 0826966-47.2024.8.15.2001, proposed by the João Pessoa prosecutor, Rosane Maria Araújo e Oliveira, who works in the defense of women.
The action is against the State of Paraíba and the Brazilian Institute of Training and Capacity Building (IBFC), the company responsible for organizing the event. The injunction was granted by judge Silvanna Pires Moura Brasil. As the public prosecutor explained, the action was filed to guarantee equal treatment from a gender perspective, granting women a reduction in the same amount of time given to men to take the physical fitness test, in relation to the 2018 notice of the same contest. “In the 2023 contest, the reduction in flat running time was disproportionate for women and men. For male candidates, the time was reduced by one second, from 16 to 15. For women, however, the reduction from the 2018 notice to the 2023 notice was three seconds, going from 20 to 17 seconds”, he detailed.
The MPPB representative highlighted that she sought to resolve the problem in a consensual and administrative way, by holding several hearings with the Competition Committee and with the general command of the PM and Fire Department, but unfortunately there was no success in resolving the conflict. “This unjustifiable lack of equality of treatment between female candidates and male candidates violates the principles of proportionality and reasonableness, causing serious and irreparable harm to female candidates, if the standards established in Notice 1/2023 were maintained”, argued the prosecutor. of Justice.
“Veiled discrimination”
The judge followed the MPPB’s understanding and highlighted that “the unequal treatment given specifically to candidates for Military Police vacancies, with the deduction of 3 seconds from the running time in relation to the previous competition, when for all other categories the running time of the test was reduced by just 1 second, it seems to want to make it difficult for women to access police personnel, exclusively, due to their gender”.
For the judge, “maintaining the 1 second reduction for candidates for vacancies in the Fire Department, gives the act, permeated with deliberately veiled discrimination, an edge of legality, as it shifts attention to those who are the target of the maneuver , under the argument that women also benefited from reduced time”. “It’s not about wanting to equalize men and women at any and all costs, exposing them to equal situations even when the nature of gender, physically, makes them unequal; but to guarantee women, at least, and as a first step, competitive conditions for access to all jobs, breaking with discriminatory cultures, concepts and thoughts, which see women as less capable beings, so that small advances already achieved do not return to sexist patriarchy, nor are they supplanted by a system of male domination. The role of the Judiciary in correcting these asymmetries is fundamental to repel the perpetuation of the condition of inferiority attributed to the female sex, giving women the support that constitutional equality guarantees them, through judgments with a gender perspective”, she argued.
The judge also ordered that the General Command of the PM and the Paraíba Fire Department be officiated urgently; the president of the competition committee and the State Attorney General to comply with the decision.
Source: Ascom/MPPB
