Lilly Ledbetter won a huge victory in her years-long battle for pay equity for women, but is it possible this long-awaited achievement may have more damaging consequences than she anticipated? Some say "yes."

Congress has approved a civil rights bill providing women, blacks and Hispanics with new tools to challenge pay discrimination at work. Ledbetter was a longtime supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, who for years worked for men who were getting paid more than her — a fact she didn’t realize until much later. Upon the revelation, Ledbetter filed a lawsuit for her back pay, but the Supreme Court rejected her lawsuit and said she should have filed her claim earlier. What the court didn’t address, however, is that many people — not just Ledbetter — don’t realize they’re victims of discrimination until far after their legal window has closed.Ledbetter kept fighting, though, and her efforts invited mounds of criticism.

Lawrence Z. Lorber, a labor law specialist who represents employers, told The New York Times the bill "causes horror among some pension lawyers." He said even retirees will be able to argue that their pension benefits are based on wages that were depressed by unlawful discrimination. Plus, there are others who say the new Ledbetter law will make sex discrimination even worse, and that it punishes supervisors, company directors and shareholders who bear no fault. Republicans and some in the business community also think it could cause an explosion of lawsuits based on old claims and discourage employers from hiring women, among other things.

But those arguments aren’t convincing everyone that Ledbetter isn’t a step in the right direction, particularly women’s groups that pushed hard for the legislation.

"Just getting us back to even is not nearly enough to overcome that stubborn wage gap," co-founder of the Center for Advancement of Public Policy, Martha Burk, writes in The Huffington Post. "Women still make only 77 cents to the dollar a man makes for full-time year-round work. We need more — much more." President Obama will reportedly sign the bill into law today, and said that he’s doing so "for my daughters."