Lilly Ledbetter, an equal pay advocate whose lawsuit against her employer inspired the Fair Pay Act of 2009, died Saturday at age 86 in Alabama.

Ledbetter died of respiratory failure, according to a statement from her family to Alabama news organization Al.com.

“Lilly Ledbetter never intended to be a trailblazer or a household name. She simply wanted to be paid the same as a man for her hard work,” wrote Barack Obama, who signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009.

Ledbetter worked at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Alabama and learned that she was making less than her male colleagues doing the same job.

Ledbetter filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer in 1998 after discovering that her annual salary was $6,500 less than the lowest-paid male supervisor. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007 that she had filed her lawsuit too late. That meant she never received the $3.8 million in back pay and damages she was awarded as part of a lower court ruling.

The lawsuit attracted national attention. Obama co-sponsored a law that gave workers greater leeway to sue their employers for unequal pay and gave women six months after receiving a discriminatory paycheck to seek redress.

Republicans, including then-President George W. Bush, opposed the bill, but when Obama took office, Congress approved the bill and Obama signed it into law. It was his first approval of a law.

Ledbetter attended the ceremony alongside Obama, his wife Michelle and labor activists at the White House.

“This is for Lilly,” Obama said at the time, handing Ledbetter a pen. “For our economy to work, we need to make sure it works for everyone. That there are no second-class citizens in our workplaces and that paying someone less because of their gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion or disability is not only unfair and illegal – but bad for business.”

Ledbetter continued to advocate for workers’ rights. She spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2012.

“I came up short, but this fight became bigger than Lilly Ledbetter. Today it’s about my daughter. It’s about my granddaughter. It’s about women and men. It’s about families. It’s about equality and justice.”

She appeared again at the White House in 2014, when Obama approved executive actions that prohibited federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their salaries and directed the Labor Department to collect statistics on men’s and women’s salaries from such contractors , The New York Times reported.

Ledbetter also wrote an opinion piece in the Times in 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, detailing the sexual harassment she faced at Goodyear.

“Sexual harassment is not just about sex, just as pay discrimination is not just about pay. Both are about power. They are clear evidence that too many workplaces value women less,” Ledbetter wrote.

Just last week, a film about Ledbetter, Lilly, starring Patricia Clarkson, premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

“It was the privilege of a lifetime to play this amazing woman,” Clark said on Today. “This woman who had so much grace, courage and fame. She was remarkable.”

Despite Ledbetter’s efforts, a gender pay gap persists in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in March that women earned 83% of men’s income last year.