What to Know About the Equal Pay Activist Lilly Ledbetter, Who Inspired Lilly

Seven months after the death of Lilly Ledbetter, for whom Congress’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named after, a film about her life opens in theaters May 9.

In the biopic Lilly, Patricia Clarkson stars as Ledbetter, a Goodyear employee who found out that she was getting paid less than fellow supervisors who were men, and follows her legal journey to the U.S. Supreme Court. The film culminates in the historic 2009 passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in Congress. 

Here’s what to know about the real woman who inspired Lilly. 

What Lilly Ledbetter endured

Growing up in poverty gave Ledbetter the resilience necessary to endure a lengthy legal fight.

She was born in 1938 in Alabama, when there were few career options for women.

“She grew up without running water, without electricity, with only a high school education,” says Lanier Scott Isom, who helped Ledbetter put together her 2012 memoir Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond. “Her clothes were made out of feed sack material.”

She was never afraid to get her hands dirty. For example, she worked at a chicken processing plant at one point to help her family make ends meet. 

In 1979, as a married mother of two children, she landed a job as a supervisor at Goodyear’s Gadsden, Alabama, plant. 

Her husband was always supportive of job, but she encountered many men who felt threatened by her. 

Ledbetter had always been outspoken about the sexual harassment she experienced on the job. 

As Isom explains: “One of her supervisors basically said [paraphrasing], ‘If you want to go to the motel down the street with me, I would ensure your promotion.’”

Lilly writer and director Rachel Feldman adds: “There was one guy who could not stop talking about her underwear and what kind of bra she was wearing, and one man who said [paraphrasing], ‘I don’t like women around here. What if I have to scratch my balls and fart?’”

Work wasn’t the only place where Ledbetter encountered offensive men. When her son suffered from repeated ear infections growing up and needed surgery, a doctor suggested she earn the money by participating in a program where young surgeons were learning how to perform hysterectomies. 

Nineteen years into a job at Goodyear, she learned that a young man she had just trained was making more than she was. An anonymous tipster left her a note at work that had the salaries of her male counterparts written out, so she could see that she was making up to $2,000 a month less than they were.

Lilly Ledbetter’s fight for equal pay

A young lawyer named Jon Goldfarb, played in the movie by Thomas Sadoski, took on Ledbetter’s case, and much of Lilly is a dramatization of her legal battle. She won money from a federal court, but then lost it when Goodyear appealed. In 2007, she lost her case in the U.S. Supreme Court, which argued that claims had to be filed within 180 days of a discriminatory action.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke to Ledbetter in her dissenting opinion, pointing out that she still had a chance to take her fight to Congress. Real interviews and speeches that Ginsburg has given about Ledbetter are woven throughout Lilly. 

As if fighting for equal pay legislation wasn’t hard enough, Ledbetter had to do it while her husband was battling cancer, even having to get his jaw removed in the process. But he was fully supportive of her efforts and had no problem with her trips to D.C. to lobby for the bill.

President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on Jan. 29, 2009, just nine days into his first term, the first major piece of legislation he signed into law as president. In the icing on the cake, Ledbetter actually got to dance with Obama on Inauguration Day, a dream come true for her because she did ballroom dancing growing up.

According to the law, pay discrimination claims would have to be made within 180 days of an employee’s last paycheck, as opposed to 180 days after the first discriminatory paycheck. As the New York Times notes, Ledbetter was never entitled to back pay from Goodyear because her discriminatory paychecks occurred before the law was enacted. 

Lilly Ledbetter’s legacy

Ledbetter died on Oct. 12, 2024 at the age of 86. Lilly is an apt tribute for a film lover like Ledbetter, who grew up going to see movies starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. “She also truly understood the power of movies—that when you affect people’s hearts, you affect their heads,” says Feldman.

Feldman consulted Ledbetter throughout the script-writing process. “There were many times when I would call Lilly, and I would say, ‘I wrote a great character here, but only Lilly Ledbetter could come up with this line, what would you say?’” When she was trying to figure out a line for the fictional Ledbetter to say when she arrives for a press briefing and asked how she calms her nerves before a dance competition, the real Ledbetter told Feldman that her character should say she dreams about winning the lottery.

TIME owner Marc Benioff, who produced the film, recalled meeting Ledbetter for the first time in a remembrance, writing about how she helped inspire him to investigate and fix pay disparities at his company Salesforce. As of 2022, the company had spent $22 million to ensure pay equity, because, he wrote, “It’s not just about fixing the problem once. It’s about making sure we are operationalizing equality as a core value of our company.”

Feldman tells TIME that she hopes moviegoers see “the importance of male allies.”

While the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a milestone, it did not end the gender pay gap. According to the Pew Research Center, women in 2024 earned an average of 85% of what men earned.