KLLM Transport Services, ranked No. 55 on the FleetOwner 500: For-Hire as well as the nation’s fifth-largest refrigerated fleet, is facing federal charges for sex discrimination.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published a press release announcing its complaint against KLLM Transport Services and its subsidiary KLLM Driving Academy Inc.

The lawsuit alleges that KLLM’s driver training academies subjected female student drivers to sex discrimination since at least January 2021.

Some of the commission's discrimination claims against KLLM include:

• Adopting male trainers’ decisions to opt out of training female student drivers instead of providing separate single-sex sleeping quarters during training, forcing women drivers to wait longer to start their training.
• Refusing to pay female student drivers who opted to receive instruction from female trainers while they waited for a female trainer to be available—though KLLM still paid all other student drivers, including males who opted for a male trainer, for the same waiting.
• Requiring only female student drivers who were willing to receive driving instruction from a male trainer to notify their spouses as a precondition to start training.

The commission filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, under Case No. 3:26-cv-02590-E.

Acting EEOC General Counsel Catherine Eschbach said that KLLM “decided to adopt a series of sex-based discriminatory policies that treated women trainees worse than male trainees and disadvantaged them in their employment opportunities, which is unlawful disparate treatment.”