By Zeba Fatima

Plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart Stores gender discrimination case brought in Texas in October filed an amended, expanded complaint on Thursday.

The new filing is the latest development in litigation originally filed in 2001 alleging that Wal-Mart promoted and paid female employees less than men, even when female workers had higher performance ratings and more seniority.

Plaintiffs alleging the retailer denied them pay raises and promotions because of their gender are regrouping after the high court last year dismantled a class of up to 1.5 million current and former Wal-Mart workers.

They filed a reformulated lawsuit against Wal-Mart in a San Francisco federal court in October, saying they were confining their allegations to California.

The lawsuit is part of a strategy to bring more narrowly tailored class actions. But in a motion to dismiss filed late on Monday, Wal-Mart said the smaller proposed class action actually seeks to cover all women who were employed at any Walmart in any region that included a California store.

Read literally, that would include most states west of the Mississippi River, Wal-Mart argued.

“This attempt to cobble back together the original class badly misses the point,” Wal-Mart said.

“Without the ‘glue’ of a common policy or practice holding individual claims together, there is no justification for adjudicating them collectively. And plaintiffs still fail to allege any such ‘glue.’”

In their amended lawsuit, the plaintiffs cited a 2004 meeting where then Wal-Mart Chief Executive Tom Coughlin told district managers that “women tend to be better at information processing,” while men are better at focusing on a single objective.

Wal-Mart proposed a May hearing date for its dismissal motion.