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As a sex discrimination suit unfolds, studies of Wal-Mart practices show a big gap in the status of men and women
When Melissa J. Howard started as a department manager at a New Castle (Ind.) Wal-Mart store in 1992, she had high hopes for a long career. And at first she rose steadily, to assistant store manager in 1993 and to store manager five years later. But after moving to a new supercenter in 1998, she says, her career hit the proverbial glass ceiling.

Howard was shocked to learn that two new co-managers at the store--both men, with no experience at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT )--were making $15,000 more a year than her $70,000 salary and bonus. Then a new district manager arrived, also a man, and soon told her flat-out that she belonged at home with her child, she recalls. Howard, the only female manager at the 10 stores in his district, complained to higher-ups but got no results. After her new boss pressured her to take a demotion, to co-manager at a store 60 miles away, she finally quit in August, 2000. "I was crushed. That was my dream just taken away," says Howard, 35, who now has a customer service job--at about half her former pay--in Indianapolis. Wal-Mart declined to comment on her allegations.

Her story is one of hundreds of similar tales marshaled by plaintiff's lawyers in a huge sex discrimination suit filed against the world's largest retailer in a California court nearly two years ago. If the judge grants class-action status in a hearing set for July, it would cover more than 500,000 women, making it the largest sex discrimination case in U.S. history. "I've never seen [pay and promotion] disparities of this magnitude," says Joseph M. Sellers of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll in Washington, D.C., one of the lawyers in the case.

In the meantime, as part of the discovery process, Wal-Mart has had to turn over an unprecedented amount of data on its entire U.S. workforce. In early February, the...