Earlier in August, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California denied the motion for class certification for a lawsuit against Wal-Mart.  The lawsuit alleged gender discrimination claims against the retail giant.  Female Wal-Mart workers claimed that men were paid more and promoted much more often than their female counterparts.  These claims were recycled from the much larger Wal-Mart lawsuit that made its way before the Supreme Court of the United States in 2011 and was also denied.  This class action would have represented 150,000 women – a large number – but certainly much smaller than the original lawsuit that sought to represent likely more than 1.5 million women.

District Judge Charles Breyer maintained that “this smaller suit remained too disparate to qualify as a class action lawsuit and that plaintiffs’ lawyers failed to show qualifying evidence of gender bias.”  The statistics that plaintiffs offered had too few experiences of discrimination to entitle them to a class action, which totaled to about 1 experience per 1,745 women in the potential class.  This ratio was determined to not be enough to establish them as a class.  Judge Breyer commented on this, saying “The statistics still do not reflect significant proof of a general policy of discrimination.”

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a) is the law surrounding the establishment of a class action.  The law states that a class may be formed and sue on behalf of all members of said class only if

“(1) the class is so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable; (2) there are questions of law or fact common to the class; (3) the claims or defenses of the representative parties are typical of the claims or defenses of the class; (4) and the representative parties will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class.”

The Court ruled that the Wal-Mart plaintiffs did not satisfy FRCP 23(a) and thus were not credible as a class.  The issue at hand is FRCP 23(a)(2): whether “there are questions of law or fact common to the class.”  To prevail, the plaintiffs needed to show evidence of gender-based discrimination across the board.  If a Court does not see that there is a pattern of discrimination against a potential class versus several individual cases of discrimination, the class cannot satisfy FRCP 23(a)(2).  This standard is a difficult one to meet, and ultimately barred the claims of female Wal-Mart employees in both the Supreme Court in 2011 and the District Court for the Northern District of California.