Lilly Ledbetter (center) was a keynote speaker at the Women's Leadership Forum. She also participated on a panel with Patricia Goodwin-Peters (left) and Meredith Hauptman (right).


Lilly Ledbetter, a keynote speaker at the Foundation for Accounting Education’s Women’s Leadership Conference on Jan. 18, made headlines when she took her employer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, to court over years of pay discrimination. While the court ruled against her, holding that her claim was time-barred, the aftermath prompted the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law in 2009. Since then, Ledbetter said she has talked to many women across the world and has concluded that the kind of discrimination she experienced is a worldwide "epidemic" that won't go away unless people, especially women, actively fight. 

“They’ve been taking advantage of women who work and produce and contribute and don’t get paid equally,” Ledbetter said. “I’ve heard it from women who are single mothers working two jobs through the week and another on the weekend, and they still can’t pay their bills. This is not right in this country.”

Noting that she had recently given a speech in Rome, and that her book is selling well in Japan, she said, “They have the same problem we do. … This is around the world; it’s not just in the south.”

While it may be tempting to quiet down if a manager promises to revisit the issue of pay inequality soon, Ledbetter said that women literally cannot afford to do that. She talked about how being underpaid, compared to her peers, directly affected her retirement, given that the pension was a percentage of what she’d made while working at Goodyear. She added that people would do well to remember that raises also tend to be calculated on a percentile basis, meaning that one’s pay not only affects today but also how much one will make throughout the course of an entire career. Overtime is also calculated as a percentage of base pay. More immediately, she said that deferring the question also means giving up all the pay that one should be receiving, which cannot be recovered even after a raise.

“That’s gone, that’s gone forever, and there is nothing in the law allowing a person to get it back,” she said.

In order to speak up for themselves, however, she said that women need to get more comfortable discussing their salaries. Right now, she said, salary is seen as a sort of proxy for one’s overall worth in society, and “that is what keeps a lot of women from talking about their pay.” Being able to fight for equal pay means learning to discuss pay in the first place.

“One thing I learned is [that] your salary determined who you are, how you live, what kind of car you buy, the house you live in, the kind of education your children get, [and] the clothes you buy,” she said.

Members of the audience shared different ways they’d found out they were paid less compared to their male peers. One said she found out at a happy hour, when colleagues were a bit more candid than usual. Another said she used the website Glassdoor.com, which has pay scales for many different companies, and she also mentioned the option of consulting recruiters in a given field.

Ledbetter said that once a woman has evidence of a pay disparity, she should first try to address the problem internally; she noted that she has a great respect for the chain of command. In her case, management repeatedly rebuffed her attempts at achieving pay equity, to the point where she felt she had no other choice but to make a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). For those trying to do the same thing, she noted that the EEOC requires proof. She said she kept a regular diary of goings-on at work, as well as discriminatory memos, such as ones that repeatedly referred to everyone as “boys.” Both the diary and the memos were admissible as proof, and so Ledbetter recommended that women who suspect they are not getting paid what they’re owed keep diaries of their own.

Overall, she urged women not to trust that the system is working for them, and that if they are feeling uneasy about something, not to immediately think they’re the cause of the problem. This was a hard lesson she’d learned over the years.

“Goodyear had a lot of contracts with the government, and I thought, they had all these rules and guidelines; surely they would be held accountable,” she said. “That was my mistake. I didn’t know they wouldn’t.”
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This post has been updated.