Gender inequality shown in movie wage
World’s highest-paid actress still makes less than top actors, writes Elahe Izadi
JENNIFER Lawrence earned $46 million this year, making her once again the world’s highest-paid actress. That’s according to Forbes, which this week released its annual list of earnings for actresses. But Lawrence’s pre-tax income pales in comparison to what her male counterparts earn.
Yes, even the super rich and famous experience a gender wage gap.
Forbes has already released its list of the highest-paid celebrities this year. And the highest-paid actor on that list is Dwayne Johnson, who earned $64.5m.
Lawrence made less than the top five highest-paid actors, as listed in the Forbes Highest-Paid Celebrities list.
In addition to Johnson, there’s Jackie Chan ($61m); Matt Damon ($55m); Tom Cruise ($53m) and Johnny Depp ($48m). If Lawrence were a man, she would have come in just ahead of Ben Affleck, who earned $43m.
Lawrence’s earnings have been part of the conversation about the Hollywood pay gap before. The 2014 Sony e-mail hack revealed the actress, along with Amy Adams, were paid less than their male co-stars for the movie
Ninety percent of the women on the 2016 Forbes list supplemented their pay from acting gigs with major endorsement deals, according to Forbes.
For instance, Jennifer Aniston, who came in fourth at $21m, made most of her money through endorsements from companies such as Emirates airlines, Smartwater, Aveeno and Living Proof, according to Forbes.
Melissa McCarthy earned $33m and the No. 2 spot on the Forbes list. She received an estimated eight-figure fee for
and designs her own clothing line. She was followed by Scarlett Johansson at $25m (reportedly paid $17.5m for next year’s
Forbes, which counts earnings before fees and taxes between June 1, 2015, and June 1, 2016, also included China’s Fan Bingbing (No. 5 at $17m) and India’s Deepika Padukone (No. 10 at $10m).
The Hollywood pay gap became a hot topic last year when Patricia Arquette turned her Oscar acceptance speech into a call for wage equity for women.
“To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights,” she said. “It is our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America!”
After the Sony hack, Lawrence wrote publicly about negotiating for deals and being “over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable.”
And Bradley Cooper, who also starred in said he was shocked to find out what Adams was paid for the film.
“She worked every day on that movie and got paid nothing,” Cooper said. “It’s really horrible actually, it’s almost embarrassing.”
Forbes has pointed to how other actresses, such as Meryl Streep and Gwyneth Paltrow, have been paid less than the men in their movies.
But there’s another factor that may be causing the gap: fewer acting roles for women than for men, which means fewer opportunities for women to earn more.
For instance, 21 of the top 100 films in 2014 had a female lead or co-lead, according to a University of Southern California study. Just 28.1 percent of all speaking roles were women. – Washington Post TOP ACTOR: Dwayne Johnson
Forbes 2016 highest paid actresses