Prevention through enforcement in private law

Introduction
Imagine the following example. A woman has a job interview and is turned down because ulti-mately the employer prefers a man for the position. The woman goes to court to seek justice. The court in fact does allow the woman’s claim because there is a substantive rule of equal op-portunity in private law forbidding gender discrimination in employment contracts. According to the private law system that the court had to apply, the appropriate remedy is compensation for damage. However, as there was no contract between the woman and the employer, in effect the pecuniary damage that the woman suffered were the travel expenses she made in order to get to the job interview. That was all she got compensated for.
This is a silly example of a case in which the substantive rule, which aimed at preventing gender discrimination, was defeated by an inefficacious enforcement instrument. It is obvious that if pri-vate law rules aim at preventing a wrong, then the remedy should at least aspire to have a pre-ventive effect. So, this example sounds like a bad joke about lawyers. In fact, the joke gets worse.