BOSTON — A sex-discrimination lawsuit by two former female employees of EMC Corp. describes a men’s locker-room atmosphere at the data-storage vendor’s sales offices and alleges that women were systematically denied equal pay and forced to accompany men on company-paid strip-club visits.

A hearing is scheduled Monday in a bid to include all women who worked in sales at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, the largest provider of data-storage systems for corporate clients, from 2001 to 2004.

More than 40 women have alleged sex-discrimination by EMC in lawsuits, affidavits or complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said plaintiffs’ attorney Linda D. Friedman.

Yesterday, after The Wall Street Journal published an article about the discrimination cases, EMC’s top executive sent the more than 33,000 employees a letter defending the company.

Joe Tucci, the president, chairman and chief executive officer, said EMC “strongly” disputes the allegations and believes they “have no legal basis.”

“More importantly, they bear no resemblance to the work environment and broad opportunities that have long existed for EMC employees around the world,” he wrote.

The suit was filed in federal court in Chicago in June 2004 by Tami Remien and Debra Fletcher, formerly of EMC’s Chicago sales office.

Friedman said class-action certification would empower EMC’s female sales workers to collectively press cases against a company that required new sales hires to sign agreements to resolve any individual employment disputes through confidential arbitration rather than through the courts.

“Companies can one by one try to knock people out and dispute their stories,” Friedman said yesterday. “When the cases are joined together, it’s about overall statistics and patterns, rather than the typical he-said-she-said.”

EMC yesterday issued a statement calling arbitration an appropriate forum for such disputes that allows relatively quick resolution of cases “without any loss of legal rights or remedies.”

The lawsuit doesn’t specify a damages total being sought. It asks that the women be awarded past and future compensation and benefits they lost, as well as punitive damages and other relief.

At Monday’s session, a judge will hear expert testimony related to the class-action question, and a ruling on class-action status isn’t expected immediately, Friedman said.

The complaint alleges that female sales employees were denied promotion opportunities and received lower pay than men, who were given the customer accounts with the highest sales potential.

“One of the most telling facts about EMC’s view of women is that it was not until 2001 that EMC issued a formal announcement that the company would no longer reimburse client entertainment expenses for strip clubs,” the lawsuit says. “Women at EMC were often forced to accompany their male coworkers and clients to strip clubs or male-oriented dining establishments like ‘Hooters.’ ”

EMC spokesman Mark Frederickson said EMC has not reimbursed strip-club visits for as long as the 28-year-old firm has been able to search back through its records.

He said the company sent employees reminders about entertainment reimbursement policies after a downturn in the technology sector hurt EMC’s business and led the company to more closely monitor such expenses. But there was never any specific announcement about strip-club reimbursement, he said.

The complaint says women were underrepresented in EMC’s sales force, which promotes the company’s storage hardware, software and services to businesses worldwide. In the Chicago sales office — one of more than 100 worldwide — about 6 of 30 employees were women when Remien and Fletcher worked there, the complaint says.

“The composition of EMC’s work force is not the result of chance but is the result of intentional discrimination,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit describes sexual discrimination as being “national in scope” at EMC sales offices.

Frederickson said EMC’s U.S. sales force is now 13.5 percent female.

From 2001 to 2004 — the period covered by the lawsuit — female sales representatives on average were paid about 5 percent more than men, he said.

EMC has several initiatives to help women develop professionally, and has more than doubled the number of women in the company’s vice presidential ranks over the past five years, Frederickson said. Employees receive mandatory training on sexual harassment.

“These policies are not new — they have long been in place,” he said.

Remien began working at EMC in February 2001, and was forced to resign less than three years later, the complaint says. Fletcher was hired in 1999, and eventually “decided she could not continue to work in such a hostile and discriminatory environment,” the complaint says. She “was constructively discharged” in July 2003.

Friedman, the plaintiff’s lawyer, said she was aware of several other similar lawsuits filed against EMC by female sales employees nationwide. The Wall Street Journal said at least six such cases have been filed since 2003.

The newspaper said some former EMC saleswomen say the company’s sales culture has a macho, frat-boy atmosphere that can be intimidating and, at times, discriminatory to women. In interviews, 17 former saleswomen and men who left between 2000 and this year described what they said were locker-room antics, company-paid visits to strip clubs, demeaning sexual remarks or retaliation against women who complained about the atmosphere. Three of the women said male managers unfairly took away accounts they had developed and gave them to men.

Founded in 1979 by two electrical engineers, EMC branched from selling office furniture to making printed circuit boards and eventually storage products. By the 1990s, its aggressive sales force had persuaded many corporate customers to use the company’s hardware instead of more expensive devices from competitors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co.

Its sales force, recruited heavily from the ranks of former college athletes, developed a reputation for never taking no for an answer, The Wall Street Journal reported. Salesmen called their best customers daily, gave them small gifts and sent them expensive bottles of wine when they dined out with their wives. Sales reps were expected to spend evenings dining with clients and weekends golfing with them.

The company still prides itself on its fighting spirit, the paper said. At a national sales meeting in Las Vegas in 2002, Tucci bounced out for a keynote address wearing boxing gloves.