The Journal. - Lilly Ledbetter: The Woman Who Fought the Pay Gap

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Lilly Ledbetter, equal pay trailblazer, died on Saturday. WSJ’s Joseph De Avila reports on how Ledbetter faced pay discrimination at her job and sued her employer, taking her case all the way to the Supreme Court. And WSJ’s Lauren Weber discusses the persistence of the gender pay gap.  Further Reading: -Fair-Wage Advocate Lilly Ledbetter Dies at 86  -Data Show Gender Pay Gap Opens Early  Further Listening: -The TikTok That Changed College Hoops  -What Corporate America Can Learn From Coke’s Reckoning With Race  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a wonderful day. Just after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama signed his first bill into law. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. And it was named after the woman who was standing just behind him. Lilly Ledbetter did not set out to be a trailblazer or a household name. She was just a good hard worker who did her job. And she did it well. Ledbetter used to work at a tire factory in Alabama.

But after about two decades at the company, she discovered that she was being paid significantly less than her male coworkers. So she sued her employer. She set out on a journey that would take more than 10 years, take her all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and lead to this day and this bill, which will help others get the justice that she was denied.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 was the most significant bill to address pay discrimination in decades. And it's still the only federal law past this century to tackle the issue. Lilly Ledbetter died on Saturday Saturday at the age of 86, and she'll be remembered as having played a major role in the fight for pay equity. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, October 17. It's Thursday, October 17th. Coming up on the show, the legacy of Lily Ledbetter and the continued fight for equal pay. How do airplanes fly? What's in this box? What does this thing do? Kids are curious about everything, including guns. Learn how to store your guns securely and make your home safer at nfamilyfire.org. Brought to you by N Family Fire, Brady and the Ad Council. Lily Ledbetter was born in 1938 in the small rural town of Possum Trot, Alabama. Her father worked at a U.S. Army depot. He was fixing engines of tanks, and her mother was a homemaker.

That's our colleague Joseph de Avila. Ledbetter got married and started working in her senior year of high school. First, she worked at General Electric and eventually ended up as a supervisor at Goodyear Tires in 1979. Years later, she spoke about her excitement at getting the Goodyear job. I had six different interviews and was accepted for the job and was thrilled beyond belief. I could not believe it. We had a tremendous Christmas.

I imagine this was not a job that a lot of women were doing. That's right. She was one of a few women that were working at Goodyear Tire at the time. She wrote a memoir about her life back in 2012 and she described this barrage of sexual harassment that she faced at work. And she described in her book some of the different things that had happened to her where one male co-worker called her Goodyear's mistake. And during a performance review in 1981, her supervisor suggested that she sleep with him

in order to get a better review. Oh my gosh. Despite the discrimination she said she faced at work, Ledbetter stayed on at Goodyear Tires for nearly 20 years. Then one day, a piece of paper changed everything. So a few months before she would eventually retire, she found an anonymous note in her mailbox. And the note had her monthly salary written on it and the monthly salary of other male

employees. Ledbetter has talked about this note in speeches and interviews over the years. Here she is in 2018. My job was exactly like those three men. My pay was 40% less than either one of those men. I was devastated. I was humiliated. I didn't know how I'd get through the night.

These were her peers and basically doing the same work that she was. And if she had been paid on a similar scale throughout her whole career, she would have been paid $200,000 more than she actually had. Wow. So it was quite a discrepancy. In 1999, a year after she retired, Ledbetter filed a pay discrimination lawsuit against

Goodyear under the Civil Rights Act. And she initially won this case. She was awarded more than $3 million. But Goodyear appealed and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And what did Goodyear say in that appeal? Goodyear raised the issue of the statute of limitations. They argued that her claim fell outside of the statute of limitations and shouldn't have been allowed to be brought.

At the time, the statute of limitation on pay discrimination cases was 180 days from the first act of discrimination. In Ledbetter's case... That would have been 1979. If she wanted to be successful, she would have had to have discovered she was being paid less, and she would have to have brought that suit back

when she was initially hired. The case made its way up to the Supreme Court, and in 2007, the court ruled 5-4 against Ledbetter and in Goodyear's favor. The Supreme Court agreed that the statute of limitations was the main issue here and didn't really take up the merits of the case itself and ruled five-four that Ledbetter had brought this lawsuit too late, two decades late. That's really remarkable because it feels like it takes quite a while for you to figure out

and gather evidence that you're being discriminated against. And 180 days seems like a very short amount of time. Yes, it was a very short amount of time. The short amount of time was part of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. She wrote, quote, pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter's case, in small increments.

Cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time. She continued, the court's approbation of these consequences is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination. Ledbetter had lost, but she didn't stop fighting. So she went to Washington.

She started talking to lawmakers and what she was really pushing for was a loosening of these statute of limitations to give people the chance to sue and not have it to be within this very tight, narrowly defined window of time. Ledbetter started lobbying for legislation that could change the statute for cases like hers. The bill she advocated for said workers could sue 180 days after their most recent paycheck. And so workers that were initially unaware that they were unlawfully paid less than they deserve, they're still able to legally challenge

that discriminatory pay when they discover it. But she ran into opposition from Republicans. What was sort of their position on it? Why were they so against it? Some said the bill was moving too fast. Others said that this could lead to frivolous lawsuits. How did Ledbetter respond to those criticisms? She tried to persuade them in telling them

this wasn't really a partisan issue, that this was a fair wage issue, that women deserved fair pay for their work, and this was one way to help make some improvements in this area. The bill eventually passed, mainly supported by Democrats. But eventually, some Republicans got on board, including all four female Republican senators. When Obama signed it into law, he praised Ledbetter as a trailblazer. 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. But this grandmother from Alabama kept on fighting because she was thinking about the next generation. After the law was passed, Lilly Ledbetter became somewhat of a star in pushing for fair wages. She spoke at the 2008 and 2012 Democratic National Convention, where she discussed her fight and her experience and why fair wages were important. We decided to fight for our family and for your family too. We sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American barrier.

That fight took me 10 years. And her message to women was to basically try to inform yourself and learn as much as you can and use what you learn to make sure that you're paid fairly. And she's always advocated for women to take that fight on and also look out for themselves. Ledbetter died on Saturday, October 12th from a respiratory illness. It was 15 years after the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law. How much impact has it had on fair pay?

That's after the break. Why is there a gender pay gap to start with? Oh, well, should we talk about patriarchy? That's a big question. Our colleague Lauren Weber writes about the workplace, and part of what she covers is the gender pay gap. This is a topic that I've covered on and off for the 13 years that I've been on this beat. It comes up occasionally when there's a lawsuit that brings it to the forefront. And more than anything, it's just, it's a persistent problem that we haven't yet fixed.

And both companies and legislators, I think, are continually ideally looking for solutions. According to Lauren, there are two ways of looking at the gender pay gap. One is a statistic put out by the Labor Department. A statistic that people are probably familiar with is that women are paid 84 cents on the dollar compared with men. That's looking in the aggregate. So you're looking at all women

working full time year round compared to all men working full time year round. 15 years ago, when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was passed, it was 80 cents on the dollar. So since then, it has only improved 4 cents. And when the data is broken down by race, the pay gap is even larger for Black and Latino women. But Lauren says this statistic is too broad to see some real progress on gender pay. And it glosses over some important nuance, including that women are more likely

to work in lower paying careers. So for example, I did a story earlier this year based on some Labor Department statistics that showed that 97% of all preschool and kindergarten teachers are women. 80% of all surgeons are men. So that's just two stark examples that show how people kind of sort themselves into different jobs. And women typically are more highly represented in lower paying jobs. A different way to look at it,

which is probably more relevant for people in their own lives, is apples to apples. Like if I'm a woman and I'm working as a reporter or as an attorney or as a manager of a retail store, am I making the same amount or a comparable amount as a man with the same job? For example, surgeons. Depending on how you compare it, the pay gap is as little as 92 cents to a dollar. how you compare it, the pay gap is as little as 92 cents to a dollar. How would you describe the gender pay gap that exists in the second bucket that we're

talking about? Yeah, in the apples to apples, I would actually say we've made a fair amount of progress in that, and I think Lilly Ledbetter has something to do with that. Still, Lauren says sexism continues to play a role in decisions about pay. And that's made the pay gap difficult to address. Often there's an assumption that women bring in a second income in a family. So maybe there's less of a feeling that, well, you know, we've got to pay a family sustaining wage to this person, even if they're doing the same work as the guy sitting at the desk

next to them. Mm-hmm. And are women still penalized for being mothers? Oh, yeah. if they're doing the same work as the guy sitting at the desk next to them. And are women still penalized for being mothers? Oh, yeah. There's a lot of clear evidence that women are still penalized for being mothers. And there's a lot of evidence that women are paid less after they have children because of an assumption that they're not going to work as hard. Maybe they won't stay in the workforce as long.

Maybe they're going to be taking more time off. Whereas there's a premium for men. it's called the fatherhood premium, when they have children, they tend to earn more. Since the Ledbetter Act, there haven't been any other federal laws addressing the pay gap. But there has been action at the state and local levels. Beginning today, employers across New York State will have to disclose proposed pay rates. A new law coming soon here in California involves employers being transparent to

prospective workers about how much money they can be paid if they get the job. All workers should be paid fairly for the value of their work. It is now the law in Colorado. You know, in about 10 different states and also a handful of cities now, employers, when they post jobs, they have to include a salary range. So you go into it as a job seeker, as somebody interviewing for a job, already armed with a lot more information than you used to have.

It's giving you more information where, as an individual, I can now advocate better for myself, I can question advocate better for myself. I can, you know, question the compensation decisions and say, well, you know, how come I'm at the lower end of this range and I'm not in the middle or the higher range? Some of the biggest progress has taken place within companies, partly because they want to be seen as fair and equitable. Another watershed moment in the move towards equal pay within companies, partly because they want to be seen as fair and equitable.

Another watershed moment in the move towards equal pay was in 2015 when the company Salesforce announced that it had conducted a pay equity audit and it was going to spend $3 million to adjust the salaries, mostly of women but also of some men, to drive more equity within its own compensation practices. It was almost like an earthquake in this movement towards pay equity. First of all, it was a big, well-respected company coming forward and saying, we were making mistakes in our compensation. They put real money into fixing it.

That became kind of an example for a lot of other companies to go ahead and do the same thing. And now we're at a point, and I think the latest statistics I saw were from 2021, where about 60% of companies conduct pay equity audits. And I think that is partly because companies realize that they're on notice. I think they are genuinely, for the most part, not exclusively, but for the most part, trying to get ahead of that and do the right thing. So with all that said, how far do you think we've come? And what is Lilly Ledbetter's legacy?

You know, as a journalist, I'm hardwired to be very skeptical, but I think this is one area where I see a lot of progress. The Lilly Ledbetter Act and her whole story, her incredible story, I think really did put companies on notice. For one thing, the act itself meant that the statute of limitations changed. So I think companies couldn't quite hide behind a statute of limitations. And I think it also empowered people to start talking a little bit more about their salary. And so just bringing some more transparency to that in how people, how individuals themselves are maybe more inclined to talk about this among themselves.

Going forward, what do you think Willie Ledbetter would want to see in this fight to close the gender pay gap? I would say it's accountability and transparency. I think Lilly Ledbetter would want to see 100% of companies do pay equity analyses. It is not a panacea. It doesn't definitively fix the problem. But I mean, as long as companies are willing to not only do the analysis, but then make It is not a panacea. It doesn't definitively fix the problem. But I mean, as long as companies are willing to not only do the analysis, but then make

the adjustments and correct people's pay when they see a problem, you know, that's, I think she'd want to see every company trying to do that. And I think she'd want to see women talking to each other about their pay and men and women talking to each other about their pay, and men and women talking to each other. We need to have men participating in this conversation. I think that's a really important step to get to. That's all for today, Thursday, October 17th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.