I have been amazed by some of the negative assumptions I’ve heard about Walmart since the Supreme Court’s decision last month in the class action lawsuit. This isn’t the company I know, and I have known it well for the past 10 years.
The Walmart I know has offered a world of opportunity to me and countless other women. I’m a Colorado native and joined the company in 2001 as an assistant management trainee at the College Avenue store in Fort Collins. Even then, it was crystal clear that Walmart had strong policies against discrimination and a culture that put respect for every individual at its core.
Policies like this created an environment in which women were empowered to advance. In fact, I was able to rise from assistant manager to a salaried store manager position in the Broomfield store in just four years. Four of my assistant managers there were women.
The Supreme Court made the right decision in the case. Every employee is due her own day in court, and the three plaintiffs can now have their cases heard on their merits. If they experienced discrimination, they deserve justice. But, as the Court ruled, the class should never have been certified because the experiences individual women had working at Walmart were simply too different. For example, the way the case was filed, I would technically have been a plaintiff in the case – against my will.
The Court also agreed with Walmart that giving store managers the discretion to make pay and promotion decisions was not discriminatory. It found that the plaintiffs provided no proof at all of companywide discrimination against women in pay and promotion, but rather presented only a loose string of unconnected anecdotes.
There’s another reason this case is personal to me. Today, I lead our store operations in Utah and Idaho, overseeing 65 stores and 20,000 associates. It’s my responsibility, along with the human resource managers on our team, to make sure all of our associates know our policies and know that violating them will not be tolerated. I also oversee or participate in many of the programs we have to help advance women — from our Women in Retail recruiting events to our mentoring circles to the training programs that prepare women associates to seize new opportunities that come along.
So how are we doing? Last year, we promoted 146,000 hourly associates, and 55 percent of those associates were women. Since 2003, the number of female officers of the company has more than doubled. And the number of women who are entry- and mid-level managers grows consistently each year, both in number and as a percentage of our workforce. No, the numbers are not as high as we would like, but we’re working hard to improve every day, just as we do with every aspect of our business.
And make no mistake, advancing women is a business strategy at Walmart. Any company that ignores the management and leadership abilities of over half of our population does so at its peril, especially in this hyper-competitive global talent market. Walmart gets that.
The company you often read about in the news is not a company I recognize. My experience has been profoundly different from the experiences of the plaintiffs, which is exactly why the Court rejected their attempt to sue Walmart on my behalf.
Karisa Sprague is regional general manager and senior director of the Mountain Division, Walmart U.S. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
