In the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case, the Supreme Court decided that the group of women could not move forward with their class action lawsuit. The main reason was that the court said the women did not meet the requirement of commonality. This legal term means that people in a group lawsuit must all share the same problem and that the solution could apply to all of them.

The Court said that the 1.5 million women had different experiences at different stores and under different managers. Since there was no clear company-wide policy that directly caused discrimination, the Court believed that the women’s claims were too different to be treated as one case. Even though the women showed patterns of unequal pay and promotion, the court said that these patterns were not enough to prove that they all experienced the same type of unfair treatment.

Because of this decision, each woman would have to file their own case instead of joining together. This made it harder for workers to take action as a group against large companies. The Court’s choice focused more on technical rules than on the bigger issue of discrimination in the workplace.