Hollywood’s Pay Gap and Why We Need to Talk About It

We all know Hollywood is misogynist, but improving slightly. For every Furiosa, Rey, Wonder Woman, Lady Ghostbusting team, and #AskHerMore red carpet trend, we get Hardcore Henry’s Girl in Brothel 1-29 and STILL NO BLACK WIDOW MOVIE, among many more travesties. However, Hollywood’s sexism is nowhere more apparent than in pay discrimination. 

Therefore, in order to “celebrate” #EqualPayDay, we’re going to talk about the gender pay gap, especially as it relates to the Hollywood system. As this piece gets a bit in the weeds, I will have delightful gifs to captivate your attention.

The Basics Regarding the Gender Pay Gap

Today, April 12, is Equal Pay Day, which is defined as “how far into the calendar year a woman must work in order to earn as much as a man earned the previous year.” Equal pay is defined as “the rate of pay for the job regardless of the sex of the worker” (Boris and Honey 1988). Women continue to be paid only a fraction of their male counterparts in similar or identical positions.

The phrase “equal pay for equal work” uses not just job titles to determine equality but also: skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions (Stanberry and Aven 2013). The current rate for white women is that they earn approximately 78 percent of every dollar their male counterparts earn. 

Minority women earn less. In fact, if you’re Latina, your Equal Pay Day isn’t until Nov. 1. African American women have to work to Aug. 23. For Native American women, Sept. 13.

There are three major theories used to explain the wage gap between men and women: human capital, occupational crowding, and discriminatory preferences. All of these theories have been analyzed at length by labor scholars and can explain portions of the wage gap.

It is important to note that after controlling for variables such as: education level, experience, career aspirations, occupational preferences, part time versus full time status, hours worked, being married, having young children at home, college major, and college GPA, the gender pay gap does not disappear (Kim 2013). 

To regulate this issue 44 states out of the United States and D.C. have a specific equal pay statute. This is on top of existing federal equal pay laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which only applied to employers involved in interstate commerce, leaving women and minority men unprotected due predominance in service industry employment. Next up, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 instituted the goal that men and women are given equal pay for equal work. However, the responsibility for enforcement shifting from the Feds to the states in the Nixon administration made regulating equal pay more difficult (as many states chose to do nothing) and yielded much of the inequity seen today.

Finally, the Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009 creates a “180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination and it resets with each new paycheck affected by that discriminatory action.” There have been attempts to pass the federal Paycheck Fairness Act and the Fair Pay Act of recent years to close a lot of these exploited loopholes, but they have gone mostly nowhere.

Stick around, as we’re going to talk Hollywood on page two.