Ruth Bader Ginsburg paved the way for gender equality in the United States. The late Supreme Court Justice, who died last week at the age of 87, achieved much of her progress for equality as a lawyer before serving on the highest bench in the country.
When Ginsburg was a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project, overseeing hundreds of gender discrimination cases—and many of them focused on financial issues. Her many victories led to significant advances in financial equality for women.
There’s still work to be done. Issues like the gender wage gap still persist—the average woman in the U.S. earned 81.6 cents to every dollar men earned in 2018, and that gap widens for women of color—but Ginsburg’s early work provided constitutional protection from gender discrimination. Without these cases, many of these discriminatory laws could possibly still be in effect today.
