I'm not sure it's beside the point, as it's a discussion about fairness and equality. Of course, actresses and actors should be paid the same amount for the same performance of same effort/quality/impact. But, the issue of gender equality in Hollywood is disconnected with real inequality (be that gender/race etc.) that results in genuine suffering - and in fairness she demonstrates awareness of that in her article. It's more unfair that there are women working three jobs and more hours than she is and only earning $25k/year. While that level of absurd inequality exists, whether she is paid $10million or $20million, it's really difficult to sympathise with her personal situation.
Yeah. Y'all are missing the fuck out of the point. If the most famous women in the world do not get paid equitably, what chance have the ones working three jobs to accumulate 25k? Additionally, the exact same basic cause is at play in both situations -- the oft-cited unwillingness to "drive a hard bargain" for fear of being labeled a so and so by the men they're bargaining with. It happens at mid-level oil companies, it happens at fast food places, guess what, it happens to the hottest actress in the world right now. So there's that.
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)
- It might be difficult to sympathize with J. Law personally - life might be more unfair for other people - ... but... uh... that's pretty much life, innit? If we all sat around deciding that only the most unfair thing we could observe or hear about deserved our attention and our attempts at rectifying, well, then, we'd spend all our time instead at figuring out lots of different ways to quantify "unfair things," and frankly that's not a discussion I care much about nor want to have. Because when you are splitting hairs at whether being below the poverty-line and raising 3 kids as a single white mom is measurably "worse" than being below the poverty-line, having no kids, but being black with a criminal history, I think you are encroaching upon a far deeper and more miserable level of inhumanity than I care to associate with. AKA: There's always a smaller fiddle, that doesn't mean the music already playing shouldn't be listened to.
First, I apologize for taking a day to get back to you on this; you ask a very legitimate question and it deserves an answer. The children's hospital scrapes and begs to get $2 mill a year to help kids with cancer because our health care system sucks. This woman makes enough in a year playing make-believe to run the charity ward for half a decade. If she gets 4/5 of what she expects to make, she will have to pass on a second house in Aspen, or not buy a house in the south of France or whatever these people do with their money. If some of the people I work with get 4/5 of what they expect to earn, they starve. This is not hyperbole as it is a problem for single moms out here to make enough working to pay for child care, school, rent and food. Forcing many of these people to take a pay cut will kick them out into the streets. The actress gets the media, the real people get told to shut up and get back to work. And now that the relative privation falacy is out of the way, onto the real answer. Lawrence got screwed, this is without a doubt a real revelation from the leaked Sony emails linked below. There was a literal conspiracy to reduce her compensation. So go to court and fight the bastards; after all you have an Oscar and millions in the bank you can get a lawyer to get this corrected. Why is she crying in public about this as it can only hurt her if she goes to court? If you want to turn this into a social issue, where Americans are not earning enough to live like our parents did, I'm right there with you. The decoupling of wages and productivity is a real thing and it is hurting our economy, real estate values and hurting our heath as well. I'm on the fence about Sanders but I am really warming up to him. I see these articles, and that shipost from the Guardian on how rich people deserve our sympathy because they are stressed out (I will NOT link it) and I'm starting to tilt more and more toward the Socialist side of the spectrum. It is almost like the wealthy, or at least the wealthy with access to the media, have lost all concept of what it is to live in the "real" world... or maybe they don't care? Or maybe it is just that we don't value work anymore as a society? This Mike Rowe talk nails what I am trying to say. Entertainers make millions and the people who build the things we need to live are treated like they are a problem to be solved. Unions are gutted and retirement ages are increasing because lawyers and accountants are living to 100 while blue collar people like my parents need to be able to call it quits early enough to enjoy at least some of their lives. I add this line as I got ready for work, and almost came back and deleted it, now I'm glad I left it in place.