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Lilly Ledbetter, and the wage gap that followed her to retirement and death
The equal pay icon died Saturday at 86, but she never stopped fighting for wage equity.
There’s a law named for her, and she was regularly recognized in airports, restaurants and gas stations across the country as “the equal pay lady.”
But when she died on Saturday at 86 of respiratory failure, the wage gap she spent decades trying to close remained.
She had to keep fighting — and couldn’t possibly have me over for tea (or coffee), she said — because her house needed repairs she couldn’t afford, even after having a solid management job at a big company for two decades.
This was something she said without shame in her later years because she was illustrating the lasting impact of the wage gap for many women like her, who spent decades being grossly underpaid.
“There are so, so many people who are in the same boat as me,” she said. “The cost of living goes up and up and up. It’s a struggle for people in the middle on down.”
The pay inequity hurt while she was working and struggling to support a family in the 1980s and 1990s, but the injustice continued to haunt her into retirement, with savings and Social Security payments far skimpier than those of the men who worked alongside (and even beneath) her.
I met her in 2018, when she returned to the steps of the Supreme Court, a place of painful memories for her.
She remembered the day her fight began.
“It was devastating. And humiliating,” she said about the moment she saw the anonymous handwritten note someone left in her box that listed the pay of three male colleagues who held the same position. “I was making about 35 percent less than they were.”
She was paid less than the lowest-paid male newbie at the plant.
So she sued Goodyear in an Alabama court and the jury was totally on her side, awarding her $3.8 million. That was later dropped to $360,000 including back pay, but she never saw a dime.
The tire giant took the case to the Supreme Court on a technicality.
She hadn’t complained about the inequity within the 180-day deadline required under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the law that was supposed to fix all this more than 60 years ago.
In a narrow 5-4 decision in 2007, the Supreme Court sided with the tire company in the case that ended with one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s most scathing dissents, accusing the eight male justices on the court of being ignorant of the nation’s wage gap.
“The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” she said, and then asked Congress to pick up the slack.
It was a cruel decision given that so much of the persistent gender wage gap — the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that women earned 83.6 cents to every dollar an American man made in 2023 — goes unchecked because of our culture of salary secrecy.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 addressed this, changing the time limit so that each skimpy paycheck, not just the first one, resets that 180-day time limit. It was the first bill that President Barack Obama signed.
“She knew it was too late for her — that this bill wouldn’t undo the years of injustice she faced or restore the earnings she was denied,” Obama said back then. “But this grandmother from Alabama kept on fighting, because she was thinking about the next generation.”
Each year, with each step she took in those halls of Congress, the gap closed a bit. She didn’t set out to become an advocate or activist, but she said the mission energized her as she partnered with the National Women’s Law Center.
“Lilly Ledbetter became my dear friend and hero, and it was my great honor to walk the halls of Congress with her and witness her unrelenting advocacy for equal pay,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center.
“It would have been easy for Lilly to quietly ease into retirement in Alabama after the Supreme Court held that there was no remedy to the decades of pay discrimination that she faced,” Graves said. “But Lilly was not built for the easy road. She shared her story because she knew that her experience of being undervalued and shortchanged on the job was the same story that working women of all ages across America shared, whether they had ever heard of the wage gap or not.”
Ledbetter kept talking about pay transparency and was unashamed to mention the financial struggles that followed her into retirement, the compounding insult of pay discrimination she faced dating back to the 1970s.
She underscored her final wishes in an NPR interview this year, on the 15th anniversary of the signing of the legislation named for her.
“I hope in my lifetime, before I check out of this life, that I can see women in this country being paid comparably to their male counterparts,” she said.
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