In the Walmart case, the Supreme Court decided that the case cannot be brought to court. They decided this because not all 1.5 million female employees were denied the same promotion, pay raise, or were insulted. There was clear evidence but not enough to carry the case, the court could not find the class to meet the requirement of commonality. The class may have been too large to win since it had millions of females, the claims made against Walmart were too generalized. In order for a class-action lawsuit to proceed it needs commonality which Dukes case didn’t have. Commonality allowed the court to proceed with their hearing because the court doesn’t want to falsely resolve an issue.

The supreme court ruled in favor of Wal-Mart because the plaintiffs didn’t have enough in common for them to file a class action lawsuit. All the women had different legal problems so they couldn’t all file a lawsuit under the same violation. 

In social theory, gender is not just biological. It is a social construct made up of expectations, norms, and power dynamics that shape how people are treated in schools, workplaces, and society. Understanding gender this way helps us see how inequality becomes built into everyday interactions and institutional practices.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes (2011) shows how this plays out legally. In this case, over a million women claimed they were paid and promoted less than men. However, the Court refused to let the case move forward as a class action. The key issue was “commonality.” To form a class, everyone must share a common question that can be answered for the whole group at once. The Court argued the women did not meet this requirement because Wal-Mart did not have a single discriminatory policy; managers across thousands of stores used their own discretion. Since discrimination wasn’t happening in the same way everywhere, the Court said the claims couldn’t be resolved together.

This case highlights a major gap: gender bias is often structural and cultural, but the legal system demands clear, uniform evidence of discrimination. So even when many women experience similar inequalities, the law may view those experiences as too individualized. This shows why understanding gender as a social system is essential—and why addressing gender inequality often requires going beyond what the courts can easily prove.

1. In the Wal-Mart case, The Supreme Court ruled against the women employees and denied their class-action lawsuit. The Court said the women did not meet the requirement of “commonality”, which is necessary for a group to be treated as a single legal “class.” The Justices argued that Wal-Mart did not have one unified discriminatory system. Rather, decisions about income and promotion were made by many different stone managers around the country. The problem was that each women had a situation unique to them, so the court said they could not show a common injury , and therefore couldn’t sue as one large group.

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes (2011) that a class-action lawsuit brought by more than 1.5 million female employees could not go forward. The women said that Wal-Mart discriminated against women in pay and promotions on a regular basis. However, the Court said that the plaintiffs did not meet the legal requirement of “commonality” under Rule 23(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. This rule says that everyone in a class-action lawsuit must have the same legal or factual claims. The Court made it clear that the plaintiffs were trying to challenge millions of individual hiring decisions without showing that there was a common discriminatory policy that linked all of them.

Justice Scalia, who wrote for the majority, said that it was impossible to prove that all of the plaintiffs had suffered the same injury in the same way because Wal-Mart’s policy gave local managers the power to decide who got paid and who got promoted. There was no “glue” holding the claims together because there wasn’t a company-wide policy against discrimination. The Court decided that general statistics and personal stories were not enough to show that there was a commonality. This decision made it much harder for large groups of employees to sue together for employment discrimination in the future. They will need to show a clear, shared reason for their claims in order to do so.

In the Wal-Mart v.Dukes case, the Supreme Court ended up deciding that the lawsuit filed by Wal-Mart’s female employees couldn’t proceed. They justified their final decision by ruling that the plaintiffs didn’t have enough commonality to be considered a single class in this class-action lawsuit. This means that since not every single female employee had the same exact issue with Wal-Mart it was not possible to come up with a singular solution ending in a single trial to fix all the issues they had but would instead require several trials for either the pay raise or the harassment which ruled them out as a class-action lawsuit. For example, in “Sex Class Action” it states “Scalia argued that to claim “commonality” a class must not only share a common problem, but also a common solution to that problem—one that would compensate all members equally in a single stroke. Because the 1.5 million female Wal-Mart employees were not all denied the same promotion, the same pay raise, or insulted, belittled, or obstructed by the same manager in the same store, their cases could not legitimately be litigated all at once.” This quote demonstrates that the Supreme Court didn’t allow the plaintiffs to proceed with their case due to being unable to resolve the issue with one single solution.

The Supreme Court decided that the women in the Wal-Mart case cannot be one big class-action group. The Court said they did not show commonality. This word means everyone in the group must share the same problem or the same issue. The Court said the women had different experiences, and there was no clear company rule that caused the same discrimination to all of them.

The Court also said that even if many women faced unfair things, it still does not prove they had the same “glue” to connect their cases together. Because of that, the class case could not continue, and the women had to start again from zero. This made it much harder for them to fight together, even when the article shows sexism was happening in many Wal-Mart stores.

The Supreme Court ruled that women couldn’t sue Walmart as one big class because they didn’t share enough in common legally. The court said there wasn’t a single company wide-policy causing the discrimination and each store manager made their own decisions about pay and promotions. Since the women weren’t all treated the same way, the court said they didn’t meet the “commonality” requirement for a class action, so the case couldn’t move forward as one group. This decision also made it harder for large groups of workers to bring discrimination cases together.