Statistical Analysis of Gender Patterns in Wal-Mart Workforce

In March, 2002 Wal-Mart turned over an electronic copy of its personnel database including data for all U.S. employees who were employed between January, 1996 and March, 2002. There were 3,945,151 persons included in this database. A Complete job history for each of these persons was provided, including job history information prior to 1996, if any. This database is called the PeopleSoft data. For each person, the database includes basic identification information such as employee ID, social security number, name, address, phone number, gender, and race, as well as extensive information on the person’s job history at Wal-Mart. The job history gives a chronological account of the jobs held, stores where the person worked, salary changes, personnel actions such as promotion or transfers, status changes indicating whether the person was active or on leave or terminated, whether the person was full-time or part-time, whether the person was salaried or hourly.

The PeopleSoft and payroll data constitute the primary data sources used for the analyses described in this report. From these sources, three main working files were created: A history file, a year-end file, and a file of job moves. The history file includes all the job history records found in the PeopleSoft data, but with only the fields of information relevant for the analyses, and with some additional
information merged from other data sources. There are 14,915,700 records in the history file. The year-end file was created from the history file to include one record for each year in which a person worked, for all the people who were included in the data. In addition, yearly payroll information, and hourly performance ratings (if any) were appended to each record. There are 9,082,732 records in the year-end file, covering the years 1996 through 2002.3 The moves file was constructed from the history file for use in the promotion analyses. It includes one record for each pair of consecutive history records when there was a change in job or there was an action code indicating a promotion took place.

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