The women who sued Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for sex discrimination in the epic 2011 Supreme Court case Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores aren’t giving up the fight.
In 2001, a group of women who worked for Wal-Mart sued their employer for gender bias, claiming the world’s largest retailer denied pay raises and promotions to women. The case was finally resolved on June 20, 2011, when the Supreme Court found that the proposed class of 1.5 million women in different jobs nationwide and with different supervisors didn’t have enough in common to constitute a single class.
But the plaintiffs didn’t give up. Last October, they amended their lawsuit to focus only on California regions and to reduce the proposed class to between 100,000 and several hundred thousand members.
On Friday, a district judge in San Francisco rejected Wal-Mart’s request to dismiss the revised suit. The judge said he would consider next February whether the plaintiffs have enough evidence to be certified as a class.
Wal-Mart maintains that the plaintiffs’ claims are unfounded. “The purported statewide class the plaintiffs allege is no more appropriate today than the nationwide class the Supreme Court has already rejected,” Wal-Mart lawyer Theodore Boutrous Jr. told Thomson Reuters.
Read Bloomberg Businessweek for more information.
For more recent InsideCounsel stories about retailers accused of discrimination, read:
Fry’s Electronics will pay $2.3 million to settle EEOC suit
EEOC investigates coffee chain for barista beauty bias
Dunkin’ Donuts faces race bias claims by former franchisees
