Lilly Ledbetter, an icon of the fight for equal pay, has died at 86

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By Alexandra Olson

NEW YORK (AP) — Lilly Ledbetter, a 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 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 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 discriminatory 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 night after a brief illness surrounded by loved ones, according to a brief statement from her family and an obituary sent by the team behind a film about her life. She is survived by her two children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Ledbetter continued campaigning for equal pay policies for the rest of her life. Last week, she was awarded the Future Is Female Lifetime Achievement Award by Advertising Week, and a film about her life starring Patricia Clarkson premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

“She lost her case and she never saw a dime but she was a tireless advocate for all of us,” said Deborah Vagins, director of Equal Pay Today and the national campaign director of Equal Rights Advocates.

“Every now then, once in a generation, you meet these people who sacrifice everything for something even if it never benefits them,” added Vagins, who met Ledbetter and introduced her to then Sen.-Obama soon after the Supreme Court ruling galvanized the movement for what would become the Ledbetter Act.

“She sparked a movement and changed the face of pay equity forever,” she said.

Among those paying tribute to Ledbetter was Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who said on the social media platform X that she “forever changed my understanding with the simple but powerful phrase, ‘Equal pay for equal work.’”

The team behind the film, “LILLY,” issued a statement of condolence on social media. In her own statement, Clarkson said “portraying Lilly Ledbetter was the privilege of my lifetime.”

In January, 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 Vagins had advocated for the measures in a January opinion piece for Ms. Magazine.

In a statement Monday, Biden said “Lilly’s decades of relentless advocacy inspired us all and have brought us closer to living up to our nation’s core values of equality and fairness.”

But Ledbetter and other advocates have long fought for more comprehensive legislation, especially the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963, including by protecting workers from retaliation for discussing their pay.

The sense of urgency among advocates deepened after an annual report from the 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 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. Experts say the reasons for the enduring gap are multifaceted, including the overrepresentation of women in lower-paying industries and the 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 an 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.

Ledbetter had worked at the plant in Gadsden, Alabama, for 19 years when she received an anonymous note saying she was being paid significantly less than three male colleagues.

Two years before she was set for retirement, she filed a lawsuit in 1999 and initially won $3.8 million in backpay and damages from a federal court. She never received the money after eventually losing her case before the Supreme Court. But a dissenting opinion from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who stated that the “ball is in Congress’ court,” inspired Ledbetter to keep up the fight for better laws.

At the Forbes Women’s Summit in 2021, Ledbetter said one of the achievements she was most proud of was that the Ledbetter act passed with bipartisan support.

The law named 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,” said Emily Martin, chief program officer at the National Women’s Law Center, which worked closely with Ledbetter.

“She is 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.”