Lilly Ledbetter, an unexpected yet decisive fighter for women’s rights, died last weekend at age 86.
Ledbetter was hired in 1979 as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama where she worked for 19 years. There, she was harassed and propositioned by a male co-worker, and when she told her supervisors, she was mocked as being a feminist. Her reputation at work was tarnished and her harasser suffered no punishment. But knowing she had to help support her family, pay a mortgage, and put her children through college, she did what millions of others do every day: she put her head down and worked hard to persevere.
Then, in her nineteenth year on the job, she received an anonymous note showing her pay compared to her male peers. While she had started her career with the same pay as those peers, her salary increases had not kept up with theirs. Over the years she had gotten fewer and smaller raises, even though she held the same position. She was stunned and felt wronged. She calculated that over the years she had been underpaid by about $200,000, which also meant significantly less for her pension and social security payments.
Ledbetter immediately decided to speak up and fight back. In 1999 she sued the company for wage discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While she won the initial case, it was taken up by an appeals court, which ruled that the verdict was invalid because she had not sued within the six-month statute of limitations. In 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling.
She left Goodyear and continued to work, but also became an advocate for women’s rights and equal pay, becoming active in Democratic Party politics and pushing for reforms to the 180-day statute of limitations for suing over discriminatory pay rates.
In 2009, after years of advocacy, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law by President Obama, making it possible for women to sue for fair pay not 180 days after the first discriminatory paycheck, but 180 days after the most recent.
Despite her efforts, the legislation with her name on it only made it a bit easier for women to sue for discrimination. It didn’t mandate or create mechanisms to guarantee equal pay, it didn’t put measures in place to stop pay and job discrimination in the first place, and it didn’t make it safer for women to challenge harassers in the workplace. Only after the Me Too movement that was sparked in 2017 did many women begin to feel less intimidated about standing up to men in their workplaces. And even today, in 2024, women still earn on average only 84 cents to every dollar a man makes. The law, while a step forward, is another example of how politicians of both parties make only the tiniest of reforms to address systemic and glaring injustices. Real change comes through movements, protest, and people speaking out.
Despite the only minor advance made by the law, Ledbetter is rightly credited with being the driving force behind its passage and is now widely recognized as a strong and decisive fighter for women’s rights and for equal pay and treatment in the workplace. Although she did not start her life or her career as an activist, she became one under the pressure of her circumstances, and with the clear recognition that she and many other women were victims of a concrete injustice. When she decided to speak out, she did so with the dignity and strength that we all have within us. She remained active throughout the remainder of her life, standing strong for women’s rights on the job.
