Ending a nine-year legal battle, a state judge on Thursday approved an $11.4 million class-action settlement that seeks to even pay and promotions for women and men working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

More than 3,000 women chose to be part of the gender-discrimination settlement, sacrificing the option of pursuing their own cases against the nuclear weapons lab and its operator, the University of California.

But at least one major provision of the settlement would revamp the lab's evaluation of raises for all employees in lower-paying clerical and technical support jobs.

"It's doing good things for both the women and the men," said supercomputer programmer Shirley Rogers Jennings, a 23-year lab veteran.

Most of the women will share in $9.7 million of the settlement payout, minus their legal fees. All will receive a 1 percent increase in their base pay, equal to about $1.7 million.