Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments to decide whether or not a gender discrimination case against Walmart may proceed as a class action lawsuit of more than 1.5 million women. The foundation of the suit is over a decade old, starting with six women with legitimate claims of discrimination in the workplace. Today, the class action suit could include over 1.5 million women, 3,400 stores and positions across the spectrum.
Such a suit suggests that either Walmart has a policy of discrimination towards women or that women are discriminated against universally across the country.
The first claim is very difficult to make. The plaintiffs would need evidence that Walmart executives go to each store and ensure that the management is discriminating against women, despite their stated anti-discrimination policies. Even if this were the case, it would have become common knowledge, deterring women from choosing to work for Walmart. Walmart would lose talent and have a smaller pool of potential employees. Subsequently, the low prices Walmart is known for wouldn’t be so low.
But women still choose to work for Walmart, so the case must really be about gender discrimination across the country. With discrimination across the country, women would still work for Walmart because nearly all other potential jobs also discriminate. To someone skeptical of numbers with little context, even this claim will be a tedious one to make properly.
Before we go ahead and raise the cost of doing business, we need a better analysis of whether or not the wage gap, and lack of women in high-powered positions, is really a sign of discrimination. Ideally, we would follow a large group of males and females over their lifetimes and track every education and employment decision they make to properly determine the existence of a gender wage gap. Unfortunately, we do not have this type of data.
The White House’s Women in America Report provides some statistics which explain away (at least some of) the pay gap. For example, on average, women work 7.6 hours whereas men work 8.8 hours a day. This alone comes out to a difference of around 30 days every year.
Moreover, men have a higher labor force participation rate than women, more women work part time and women are more likely to take time off than men. Add just these known stats up over time and the persistent wage gap looks less like discrimination and more like differences in experience.
In fact when you look at men and women when they first start working, there is little to no gap between wages. The wage gap grows over their life cycle, as we could predict from the above statistics.
There is no reason that Walmart should lose this case. First, It will be impossible to prove that Walmart’s corporate culture systematically discriminates across their stores. And second, Walmart should not be held up as an example for the rather weak argument of gender discrimination across America.
