Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009

It was really an honor to work in President Obama's administration, and they really cared deeply about disparities in the labor market.

You know, in fact, the first bill that President Obama signed into office was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

that changed the statute of limitations for filing equal pay lawsuits.

And the idea there was that a woman might not know she was being discriminated against the moment she gets her paycheck.

One of the things Congress can do is a lot of the really bad rulings are, are rulings where Congress could fix them, could respond by passing laws to, to fix the, the, the mistake that a Supreme Court made or, or a ruling made by the Supreme Court.

So you might remember the Lilly Ledbetter Act.

Um, this was a ruling, a re- really sort of a terrible ruling where the Supreme Court, this was about 15 years ago, uh, uh, made it much harder for, for, uh, people to sue for workplace discrimination.

And, and they said, "Okay, Congress, the ball's in your court." That's what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her dissent.

Women are about twice as likely as men to say that they've been discriminated against at work because of their gender.

In January of 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

It was named after a woman who fought for 10 years against gender pay discrimination at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

She was awarded a $3 million jury settlement, but that ruling was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the early days of his presidency, he got to work attempting to fulfill many of his campaign promises.

He supported reforms to the financial system like the Dodd-Frank and Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

He outlawed the torture of prisoners who were detained during the War on Terror, removed some of the restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research, ended the ban on federal grants for international groups providing abortion services and counseling, and named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, making her the first Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic descent.

After evaluating the consequences of the Great Recession of 2008, he pushed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through Congress.