Lilly

In 1979, Lilly Ledbetter (14 April 1938–12 October 2024) began working at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Gadsden, Alabama. After nineteen years she received an anonymous note revealing that she had been paid substantially less than many male colleagues with comparable or lesser experience and seniority. Her sex discrimination suit against Goodyear initially succeeded, but that victory was overturned on appeal, including by the Supreme Court. A majority of the justices held that she would have needed to have brought her claim within 180 days of her very first unequal payslip—many years earlier—even though she had no way of knowing about the pay disparity for most of that time. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a blistering dissent which, in an unusual departure from normal Supreme Court practice, she read aloud from the bench, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2009 became the first law enacted during Barack Obama's presidency.