In 2007, five men on the Supreme Court told Lilly Ledbetter that
she was out of luck. Ledbetter, after two decades working as the
only female supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, had
sued her employer for wage discrimination–she had discovered
that for all those years she had been paid less than male
colleagues doing the same job. But the Supreme Court told her
that the way they did the math it was too late for her to sue.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at that time the only woman on the
Supreme Court, took the unusual step of reading her dissenting
opinion from the bench, accusing the five-Justice majority of
not understanding the reality of Ledbetter’s situation. She
declared, “In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is
indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims
of pay discrimination.” The Ledbetter case was a stark example
of what it means to have women judges and justices on the bench.
Many great pro-equality decisions have been made by male judges,
and women judges ar