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Article

26 Jun 2011

Author:
Philip Delves Broughton, Financial Times

Walmart should fear its gender bias culture [USA]

Last week’s decision by the US Supreme Court to dismiss the largest sex discrimination suit in the country’s history, filed on behalf of 1.5m female Walmart employees…spared Walmart having to pay out billions of dollars in compensation…The court ruled Walmart’s female employees did not constitute a single class for the purposes of a discrimination suit…Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the judgment on behalf of the four dissenting judges, said that while there were questions about the validity of the suit as a class action, there was uncontested evidence that gender bias still “suffused Walmart’s corporate culture”…Walmart’s real problem is that women fill 70 per cent of the hourly jobs in its shops and yet make up only 33 per cent of management. Women are paid less than men in every region and the salary gap between men and women widens over time…Walmart lobbied for years to create a flexible, low-cost labour environment, without the inconvenience of unions…But when a company is allowed to rid itself of unions to grow more aggressively, it is expected to repay that trust by treating workers fairly.