Lilly Ledbetter

Rest in Power: Lilly Ledbetter, Trailblazing Icon for Women’s Equal Pay

Lilly Ledbetter, an equal pay activist whose legal fight against her employer led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, died this weekend. She was 86. 

“One of the next steps in reaching pay equity is the Paycheck Fairness Act—a bill that would amend the Equal Pay Act of 1963 to give workers stronger enforcement tools and remedies to help close the pay gap between men and women once and for all,” wrote Ledbetter in an op-ed for Ms. in January. “But things have been frustratingly stagnant in Congress.”

The Future of Pay Equity, 15 Years After Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

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Fifteen years ago, we stood at the White House while then-President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This law restored the rights of employees to have their day in court for ongoing wage discrimination taken away by the Supreme Court in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear case.

This bill was such an important victory for workers and gave employees who were experiencing ongoing pay discrimination their day in court.  However, the law did not give women new tools to combat the wage gap itself. Still, with all working women earning on average 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts—and the pay gaps even wider for women of color—it reminds us our work is still far from finished. We will not rest until we can enact more policies that give workers stronger tools to challenge pay disparities and other forms of employment discrimination.

Fighting for Pay Equity: A Q&A with Lilly Ledbetter and the Filmmaker Telling Her Story

Fighting for Pay Equity: A Q&A with Lilly Ledbetter and the Filmmaker Telling Her Story

When Lilly Ledbetter, a longtime manager at Goodyear, discovered her salary was significantly lower than her male colleagues, she took the company to court. While her case was overturned at the Supreme Court, her hard work finally paying off when President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 into law as his first official act.

Now, Lilly’s life and her case are going to be the subject of “Lilly,” a feature film, directed by Rachel Feldman and starring Patricia Clarkson. Ms interviewed Ledbetter and Feldman about their exciting project.

Lilly Ledbetter’s Fight for Equal Pay Gets the Big Screen Treatment

Across industries, women continue to be paid less than men for the same work—and that’s especially true in Hollywood. Indeed, it appears as if the eradication of workplace sex discrimination may be too fantastical a concept for even the world’s largest creative industry to imagine. But feminist filmmaker Rachel Feldman hopes to change that with a little help from her […]

Locker-Room Secret

Locker Room Secret A review of Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond By Liza Featherstone “I was like a wife nursing a nagging suspicion that her husband’s having an affair, with no hard evidence. But now there it was in plain black ink,” writes Lilly Ledbetter, a […]

Four New Laws Wisconsin Women Can’t Afford

It might seem a bad time to repeal equal pay laws when women who graduate college earn $1.2 million less during their lifetimes than their male peers. It might also seem ill-conceived to replace effective sex education with abstinence-only programs while making abortion restrictions tighter. But Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has never been a master […]

The War on Women in the Courts

In 2007, five men on the Supreme Court told Lilly Ledbetter that she was out of luck. Ledbetter, after two decades working as the only female supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, had sued her employer for wage discrimination–she had discovered that for all those years she had been paid less than male […]