Selling Women Short by Liza Featherstone

Author:Liza Featherstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

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POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS

BETTY DUKES V. WAL-MART STORES is the largest sex discrimination class-action suit ever filed against a private employer and, indeed, the scale and scope of Wal-Mart’s female troubles are extreme. Yet sex discrimination is a problem throughout the retail industry, the sector upon which poor women increasingly depend for employment. While the retail industry average of 40 to 50 percent female management is better than Wal-Mart’s 33 percent, it’s still not great, considering that most of the sector’s hourly workers are women. Clearly the retail industry suffers from a systemic problem, of which Wal-Mart is just a particularly egregious example.

In his autobiography Sam Walton wrote:In the old days [retailers] didn’t think women could handle anything but the clerk jobs because the managers usually did so much physical labor—unloading trucks and hauling merchandise out of the stockroom. . . . Nowadays, the industry has waked up to the fact that women make great retailers. So we at Wal-Mart, along with everybody else, have to do everything we can to recruit and attract women.1

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