Lilly Ledbetter, an former Alabama factory manager whose lawsuit against her employer made her an icon of the equal pay movement and led to landmark wage discrimination legislation, has died at 86.
Ledbetter’s discovery that she was earning less than her male counterparts for doing the same job at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Alabama led to her lawsuit, which ultimately failed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that she had filed her complaint too late.
The court ruled that workers must file lawsuits within six months of first receiving a discriminatory paycheck – in Ledbetter’s case, years before she learned about the disparity through an anonymous letter.
Two years later, former U.S. president Barack Obama signed into the law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gave workers the right to sue within 180 days of receiving each discrimination paycheck, not just the first one.
“Lilly Ledbetter never set out to be a trailblazer or a household name. She just wanted to be paid the same as a man for her hard work,” Obama said in a statement Monday.
“Lilly did what so many Americans before her have done: setting her sights high for herself and even higher for her children and grandchildren.”
Ledbetter died Saturday of respiratory failure, according to a statement from her family cited by the Alabama news site AL.com.
Ledbetter continued campaigning for equal pay for decades after winning the law named after her. A film about her life starring Patricia Clarkson premiered last week at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Enduring legacy
In January, U.S. President Joe Biden marked the 15th anniversary of the law named after Ledbetter with new measures to help close the gender wage gap, including a new rule barring the federal government from considering a person’s current or past pay when determining their salary.
Ledbetter and other advocates for years have been frustrated that more comprehensive initiatives have stalled, including the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
The sense of urgency among advocates deepened after an annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau last month found that the gender wage gap between men and women widened for the first time 20 years.
In 2023, women working full time in the U.S. earned 83 cents on the dollar compared with men, down from 84 cents in 2022.
Even before then, advocates had been frustrated that wage gap improvement had mostly stalled for the last 20 years despite women making gains in the C-suite and earning college degrees at a faster rate than men.
Pay gap continues
Experts say the reasons for the enduring gap are multifaceted, including the overrepresentation of women in lower-paying industries and weak childcare system that pushes many women to step back from their careers in their peak earnings years.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Ledbetter wrote a opinion piece in The New York Times detailing the harassment she faced as a manager at the Goodyear factory and drawing a link between workplace sexual harassment and pay discrimination.
“She was indefatigable,” said Emily Martin, chief program officer at the National Women’s Law Center, which worked closely with Ledbetter.
“She was always ready to lend her voice, to show up to do a video, to write an op-ed. She was always ready to go.”
Ledbetter was a manager at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama, and had worked there 19 years when she received an anonymous note saying she was being paid significantly less than three male colleagues.
She filed a lawsuit in 1999 and initially won $3.8 million US in backpay and damages from a federal court. She never received the money after eventually losing her case before the Supreme Court.
Although the law named after her didn’t directly address the gender wage gap, Martin said it set an important precedent “for ensuring that we don’t just have the promise of equal pay on the books but we have a way to enforce the law.”
“She is a really an inspiration in showing us how a loss does not mean you can’t win,” Martin said. “We know her name because she lost, and she lost big, and she kept coming back from it and kept working until the day she died to change that loss into real gains for women across the country.”