She sued Goodyear in 1999, winning $3.8 million. She received none of it and her case was overturned.
Lilly Ledbetter, whose lawsuit against her employer paved the way for the Fair Pay Act of 2009 and who dedicated decades of her life to fighting for equal pay, has died, according to the makers of a film about her life that came out this month. She was 86.
In 1979, Ledbetter got a job at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Gadsden, Alabama. “We needed that money to pay college tuition and the mortgage,” she said at Forbes Magazine’s women’s summit in 2021.
At first, Ledbetter earned the same as her male counterparts, she said. But over time, her pay dropped “way out of line” compared with that of her male peers — unbeknown to her. At the factory, she said in 2021, employees could lose their jobs for sharing information about their salaries. It was not until 1998 that Ledbetter found out, by receiving an anonymous note, that she in fact earned much less than men working the same position.
“I was devastated,” she said.
In a 2018 Opinion essay in The New York Times, Ledbetter wrote that she was also sexually harassed early on in her tenure at Goodyear.
After finding out about the pay discrepancy, Ledbetter went home and talked to her husband.
