Lilly Ledbetter, Whose Fight for Equal Pay Changed U.S. Law, Dies at 86

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, died in Alabama on Saturday, her family said in a statement. She was 86.

The cause was respiratory failure, the statement said.

In 1979, Ms. Ledbetter got a job at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Ala. “We needed that money to pay college tuition and the mortgage,” she said at Forbes Magazine’s women’s summit in 2021.

At first, Ms. Ledbetter earned the same as her male counterparts, she said. But over time, her pay dropped “way out of line” compared to 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 Ms. 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 Times, Ms. Ledbetter wrote that she was also sexually harassed early on in her tenure at Goodyear.

After finding out about the pay discrepancy, Ms. Ledbetter went home and talked to her husband. “And we decided to fight,” she said in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2012.

Ms. Ledbetter filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1998 and a lawsuit against Goodyear in 1999. In 2003, she won her case at a federal court in Alabama, with the jury awarding her $3.8 million. (In a 2009 interview with NPR, Ms. Ledbetter said that the sum was reduced to a $300,000 cap and $60,000 in back pay.)