It's not that we're missing the point - it's just that I don't think her personal situation is a particularly useful example to further wider gender pay/opportunity discussions - but great that it gets us talking about it. JLs pay is insanely high, which raises more fundamental equality issues. It is also likely that it is negotiated by a (male/female?) agent with few benchmarks. It's also made more complex because celebrities (film/music/sports etc.) pay is often linked to their image/personal following/popularity of the sport etc. - though you'd think that would be in her favour. While I don't doubt there is some truth that men are viewed more positively for driving a harder bargain, I don't think there is a single basic cause that leads to the gender pay gap. I was listening to a BBC documentary that said that motherhood is actually the biggest cause of the gender pay gap for middle/higher income roles in the UK, with studies showing that women that stay in employment earn the same as men. The problem is that these really capable mothers come back into the workforce after having children, but because we have less flexible working conditions and place value on recent work experience above capacity, they loose out on opportunities and have to make compromises.
Food for thought, food I raised via email with the redoubtable wasoxygen as I was giving this issue more attention: men and women in the workplace (in the US) are non-homogenous goods thanks to the way FMLA time is set up (and due to other factors). As a CEO, I am very possibly acting strategically in paying a 25 year old woman less than a analogous man, until career-likelihood statistics etc balance out. Wage politics in general are highly complex, especially at the top where there are no particular precedents. Actresses cannot get on glassdoor and see what they're supposed to be making. This is complicated further by my deepseated belief that the decline of the American family is at the heart of pretty much all of our problems. Parents cannot both work and raise a child, at least not without iPads. The clear solution is for one parent to work and one parent to raise (as used to be the case), and for both man and woman to embrace their roles (as to some extent they used to). It strikes me that the ideal is for the work and child-raising to be split 50/50 by each parent, but modern employment norms make that impossible. Next best is what we used to have -- but it was rather unfair. So while I remain a firm believer that one parent ought to work and one parent ought to stay at home, I think the world would perhaps not end if half of those stay-at-home parents were men. Thus is the trend, slowly. There remains hope. I guess you can ignore this because it doesn't have anything in particular to do with whatever we were talking about. -- I weighed in to begin with because I found the objections pedantic, since Lawrence acknowledges them herself in the blog post.
Stumbled across the forbes top ten list of highest earning comedians. There are definitely some funnier women out there. 1. Jerry Seinfeld $36m (£23m) 2. Kevin Hart $28.5m (£18m) 3. Terry Fator $21.5m (£14m) 4. Jeff Dunham $19m (£12m) 5. Russell Peters $19m (£12m) 6. Aziz Ansari $9.5m (£6m) 7. Louis C.K. $9m (£5.8m) 8. Gabriel Iglesias $8.5m (£5.5m) 9. John Bishop $8m (£5m) 10. Dave Chappelle $7.5m (£4.8m)