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

Lilly Ledbetter, the 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 the age of 86.

Ledbetter’s discovery that she was paid less than her male colleagues for the same job at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in Alabama led to his lawsuit, which ultimately fell through when the US Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that he had filed his appeal again. late.

The court ruled that workers must file lawsuits within six months of receiving discriminatory pay — in Ledbetter’s case, years before she learned of the discrepancy in an anonymous letter.

Two years later, the former US president, Barack Obama, signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gave workers the right to file a lawsuit within 180 days of receiving each discrimination check, not just the first.

“Lilly Ledbetter never set out to be a vigilante or a household name. She wanted to be paid the same as a man for her hard work,” Obama said in a statement on Monday.

“Lilly did what so many Americans before her have done: set her sights high and very high on her children and grandchildren.”

Ledbetter died Saturday of respiratory failure, according to a statement from his family cited by the Alabama website AL.com.

Ledbetter continued to campaign for equal pay for decades after winning the legislation named after him. A film about his life starring Patricia Clarkson premiered last week at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

A lasting legacy

In January, US President Joe Biden marked the 15th anniversary of the Ledbetter law with new measures to help close the gender wage gap, including a new law that prohibits the federal government from considering a person’s current or past income when determining their salary.

Ledbetter and other advocates have for years been frustrated that broader efforts 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 US Census Bureau last month found that the gender pay gap between men and women widened for the first time in 20 years.

In 2023, full-time working women in the US earn 83 cents on the dollar compared to men, down from 84 cents in 2022.

Even before that, advocates were frustrated that improvement in the wage gap has largely stagnated over the past 20 years despite women making gains in the C-suite and earning college degrees at a faster rate than men.

The pay gap persists

Experts say the reasons for the persistent gap are many, including the overrepresentation of women in low-wage industries and a weak childcare system that pushes many women back into the workforce in their prime earning years.

In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Ledbetter wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times detailing the harassment she experienced as a manager at the Goodyear factory and drawing connections between workplace sexual harassment and pay discrimination.

“She was relentless,” said Emily Martin, director of programs at the National Women’s Law Center, which works closely with Ledbetter.

“He was always ready to lend his voice, just make a video, write an op-ed. He was always ready to go.”

Ledbetter was a manager at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama, and had worked there for 19 years when she received an anonymous letter saying she was being paid significantly less than her three male colleagues.

He filed suit in 1999 and initially won $3.8 million US in compensatory and punitive damages in federal court. He did not receive this money after losing his case in the Supreme Court.

Although the law named after him did not directly address the gender pay gap, Martin said it sets an important example “to make sure we don’t just have an equal pay promise on the books but we have a way to enforce the law.” .”

“He’s really an inspiration in showing us that losing doesn’t mean you can’t win,” Martin said. “We know her name because she lost, and she lost a lot, and she kept coming back from it and continued to work until the day she died to turn that loss into a real gain for women across the country.”