This film recounts the inspiring true story of Lilly Ledbetter (Patricia Clarkson), an Alabama worker at the Goodyear Tire Company. She has risen in the ranks to a position as a supervisor, but then she discovers that for 20 years she has been paid half of what the male workers were getting, just because she is a woman. Her protests to management are ignored, so she decides to sue for justice. Her case goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2007, you would think the Court would side with her because of the injustice of her treatment. (Perhaps today, when the Supreme Court has an obvious corporate and conservative bias, we would not be surprised that she loses her case.) The Court ruled that she should have filed her complaint within 180 days of when decisions about her pay were made – i.e. years earlier.
But this result from the highest court in the land does not stop Lilly. She takes her case to Congress, stopping Senators and Representatives in the halls, arguing that gender was the only reason for pay discrimination and they needed to pay a law for fair compensation. Eventually Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama.
Patricia Clarkson captures both the Southern gentility and the fierce determination of Lilly. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called this case one of the most important of her career, and she appears in the film talking about it. The movie is very instructive about how much courage, resilience, and leg work it takes to get justice in the American system.