Allison Schieffelin

Los Angeles, July 18: The women workers of Wall Street and Wal-Mart would appear worlds apart: One group shows up in suits from Bergdorf Goodman and takes home a paycheck routinely into six figures; the other clocks in wearing a trademark blue smock and might not clear $30,000 a year.

Their shared experience became apparent this week, however, as securities giant Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $54 million to settle a sex discrimination case. That move came less than a month after a judge ruled a lawsuit against Wal-Mart can proceed as a class action covering about 1.6 million women. The claims in each case are strikingly similar.

Both groups contend a pattern existed in which women were paid less than their male counterparts. They also recounted tales of bad behaviour by male co-workers with a startling sameness — in the Wall Street case it included a birthday cake shaped like a breast and trips to strip clubs; in the Wal-Mart case, it was business meetings at a Hooters restaurant and women told to “doll up.”

“I was kind of shocked, because I guess I see those as more of your upscale, professional type offices,” Melissa Howard, a former Wal-Mart store manager in Indiana involved in the class action case, said of learning about the claims in the Morgan Stanley case. “I think it just happens so much more widely than what people realise.”

The ripples of Morgan Stanley’s high-profile settlement — the second-largest resolution the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has reached with a company it sued and the first with a major securities company — could reach women workers many rungs below the investment banker class, employment lawyers said.

As a practical matter, it could put pressure on employers facing similar lawsuits to settle, they said. More broadly, it could prompt companies “from Wall Street to Main Street” to scrutinise their employment practices, said David Grinberg, a spokesperson with the employment commission.

“We think it will have a major impact in terms of women being more aware of their rights and possibly coming forward in greater numbers, as well as corporations being more aware of what their responsibilities are,” Grinberg said.

Washington, D.C., lawyer John P. Relman, who specialises in workplace civil rights litigation, said the Morgan Stanley settlement, coupled with last month’s class action certification in the Wal-Mart lawsuit, is a “one-two punch...that sends a powerful message to employers about gender discrimination issues.” “I don’t really see how Wal-Mart could settle now for anything less than billions of dollars,” Relman said.

In the Morgan Stanley case, he added, “I don’t think any employer can look at $54 million and say that’s not a wake-up call.” The settlement could cover more than 300 women who worked in a division of its investment bank and requires the company to spend $2 million on diversity programs overseen by an outside monitor.

But it also allowed the company to avoid potentially embarrassing courtroom tales about Wall Street machismo that women at the company said left them underpaid and underemployed. The lead plaintiff, former bond saleswoman Allison Schieffelin, and 20 other current and former employees were prepared to testify about the breast-shaped cake, workplace stripteases, sexist comments and stops at strip clubs with key clients.

Women can face bias even in the courtroom, the report noted. A 2003 study of wrongful discharge jury trials in California found that women who alleged age discrimination lost every case they tried, while men who raised the same claim won 36 per cent of the time.