The Supreme Court decided that roughly 1.5 million female employees could not bring their discrimination claims as a single, nationwide class-action lawsuit, and it justified this decision by concluding that the women did not meet the legal requirement of commonality, which requires all members of a class to share a common question that can be answered in the same way for everyone. The Court explained that Wal-Mart did not have a uniform, company-wide discriminatory policy and that decisions about pay and promotions were made independently by thousands of individual managers, meaning the women could not show they all experienced the same kind of discrimination in the same way. Because of this lack of a shared, central issue, the Court ruled that the group could not proceed as a class.