A Grim Landscape in Wal-Mart Nation

Supervisor Bill looks around his department and fumes over how many single women have jobs when his own brother, who has a family to support, can't find work.

Supervisor John, still steaming over his divorce, is convinced that every woman is just as greedy as his ex-wife.

Supervisor Phil thinks any woman who doesn't wear much makeup isn't trying hard enough.

Supervisor Bob insists that a woman's sense of judgment fluctuates with her menstrual cycle.

Supervisor Mark believes that God created Adam first for a reason and that no man should have to take orders from a woman.

In every instance, these male supervisors are wrong in their perceptions of women. If their beliefs in women's inferiority drive their managerial decisions in the workplace, they are breaking the law. That doesn't mean, however, that they won't get away with it.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the 1.5 million female workers for Wal-Mart who claimed — in the largest civil rights class-action suit in history — that the company favored men over women in pay and promotions.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court's majority, said the women did not have enough in common to be certified as a single class. What seemed to matter most to the all-male majority was that even if the male supervisors did discriminate against women, each did it in his own way.

Let's hear it for creativity.

No one sums up the impact of this decision better than Slate's Dahlia Lithwick:

"Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, seems to have figured out that the key to low-cost discrimination lies in discriminating on a massive scale."

She adds: "A lot of critics are saying that this decision has created a new rule: Some companies are simply too big to sue. But that's only half the story. The other half is that in the court's eyes, sex discrimination is simply too pervasive to be a problem."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for all three women on the court and Justice Stephen Breyer, zeroed in on the impact of corporate Wal-Mart's hey-don't-blame-us policy of management:

"Women fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs in the retailer's stores but make up only 33 percent of management employees.

Ginsburg also made clear that in discrimination, innovation should not be rewarded.

"The very nature of discretion," she wrote, "is that people will exercise it in various ways."

Before you step foot in a Wal-Mart store, consider these court pleadings from some of its female employees:

When Kim McLamb discovered that male employees made more than female employees working the same jobs, she complained to three different assistant managers. Each told her it was because the men "had families to support."

Store manager Melissa Howard had to attend district meetings at a Hooters restaurant. On one occasion, two male members of management traveling with Howard insisted on stopping at numerous strip clubs. She didn't feel safe sitting by herself in the dark parking lot. She went into the club, where a stripper and a male district manager proposed that she join them for a "threesome out back."

"Managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware," Justice Ginsburg wrote. "The risk of discrimination is heightened when those managers are predominantly of one sex, and are steeped in a corporate culture that perpetuates gender stereotypes."

Some managers are indeed unaware.

Sometimes they know exactly what they're doing, and they just don't care.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and an essayist for Parade magazine. To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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