Judge Finds Lucky Guilty of Sex Bias : Litigation: Ruling favoring women employees could lead to tens of millions in damages.

In what could yield one of California’s biggest sex discrimination judgments, a federal judge on Tuesday found Lucky Stores guilty of shunting women at its Northern California supermarkets into jobs providing lower pay and less opportunity for advancement.

“Sex discrimination was the standard operating procedure at Lucky with respect to placement, promotion, movement to full-time positions and the allocation of additional hours,” U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in San Francisco said in a 193-page ruling.

The ruling sets the stage for a trial next month on damages, which could run into the tens of millions of dollars. A lawyer for the women said about 10,000 Lucky employees since 1984 could share in the damages.

Lucky, which said it is considering an appeal, maintains that a much smaller group would be eligible for back pay. If the plaintiffs prevail on that point, however, the ultimate judgment “would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, sex discrimination judgments in the history of California,” said William S. Waldo, a management lawyer in Los Angeles with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker.

The decision comes four months after a settlement in another celebrated sex discrimination case in California. In that case, the largest civil rights case settlement in history, State Farm Insurance agreed to pay $157 million to 814 California women who contended that they were denied jobs as sales agents because of their sex.

In the Lucky case, Patel found that from 1984 to 1989, women accounted for 46.6% of the newly hired employees in 188 Lucky stores but 84% of the new hires in the deli-bakery and general merchandise departments, which paid less than other departments and offered little chance to move into managerial jobs.

Women were 35% of new hires in the produce and grocery departments, which had higher pay and more advancement opportunities, Patel said. She also accepted the findings of an expert witness that women earned only 76% to 82% of male employees’ pay.

The judge rejected Lucky’s key argument: that the disparity resulted not from discrimination, but from women’s preference for jobs in certain departments and for daytime work.