The gender pay gap is still a prevalent issue that women face, with women in the US earning 84% as much as men in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. This means that a woman would have to work an estimated 42 extra days to make as much money as a man in the same position.
The gap is wider for women of color. According to the Center for American Progress, for every dollar white, non-Hispanic men make, Black women earn 64 cents, Native American women earn 60 cents, and Hispanic women earn 57 cents.
One of the industries where the gender pay gap is the most conspicuous is the entertainment industry, with many famous women calling out the huge disparities in their paychecks compared to their male costars'.
Here are 21 times women were grossly underpaid on set:
1.Challenging reports that she made $7 million for The Martian while Matt Damon made $25 million, Jessica Chastain clarified that she "made less than a quarter of that in reality."
2.Then, after Octavia Spencer educated her on the pay disparity that women of color face, Chastain offered to tie her and Spencer's salary negotiations together to help them get a better deal — and Spencer got five times her initial salary.
3.Arden Cho reportedly declined to return for the Teen Wolf reboot because she was offered "half the per-episode salary proposed to her three counterparts.”
4.The X-Files ran for three years before Gillian Anderson was paid as much as David Duchovny was, and when the show was renewed in 2016, she was offered half of what he was offered to return.
5.Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett received millions of dollars for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but Taraji P. Henson — who asked for $500,000 — was only paid $150,000.
6.When Priyanka Chopra made only 5% of what her male costar earned for a Bollywood movie, the producer told her, "This is the budget for the girl, and we can’t move beyond that."
7.The same year that Natalie Portman won an Oscar for Black Swan, she was paid only a third of what Ashton Kutcher (who has no Oscar nominations) made in their rom-com No Strings Attached.
8.When Jennifer Lawrence found out from leaked Sony emails that she was paid significantly less than her male American Hustle costars — 7% of back-end compensation compared to the 9% that Jeremy Renner and Bradley Cooper were given — she was mad at herself and felt she "failed as a negotiator because [she] gave up early."
9.Her costar Amy Adams, on the other hand, knew they were being paid less than the men but "still agreed to do it because the option comes down to do it or don’t do it...so you just have to decide if it’s worth it for you" but "it doesn’t mean [she] liked it.”
10.Vanessa Morgan said that she's "the only Black series regular but also paid the least" on Riverdale.
11.It wasn't until the eighth season of Shameless that Emmy Rossum was offered pay parity with her costar William H. Macy, but she held out for more to make up for the years she'd been paid significantly less than him.
12.Grace Park declined to return for the eighth season of Hawaii Five-0 after CBS refused to give her pay equality with costars Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Caan.
13.Though she didn't name which movie, Amanda Seyfried said that on a big budget production, she once made 10% of what her male costar earned — and they were both already huge names in Hollywood.
14.Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch tried to hold out for pay parity with the rest of the Big Bang Theory main cast (all of whom made $1 million per episode). However, even after their costars all took a $100,00 per episode pay cut in solidarity, they were only able to negotiate up to around $425,000 per episode.
15.Catt Sadler left E! News after a female executive informed her that her male cohost was making nearly double her salary — and he had been for years.
16.Hilary Swank said that her "male counterpart will get paid 10 times more" than she does.
17.For All the Money in the World, Michelle Williams reportedly earned $625,000, whereas Mark Wahlberg earned $5 million.
18.Netflix reportedly paid Amy Schumer $11 million for her comedy special The Leather Special, but after she learned that some male comedians — including Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle — were paid $20 million for similar projects, she went back to the streaming service to ask for higher (but not equal) compensation.
19.On the set of Spider-Man, "the pay disparity between [Kirsten Dunst] and Spider-Man was very extreme," but she "didn’t even think about it."
20.In her memoir, Then Again, Diane Keaton revealed that her Something's Gotta Give contract didn't include back-end profits, whereas Jack Nicholson's did.
21.And finally, Charlize Theron was initially offered $10 million less than Chris Hemsworth for Snow White and the Huntsman, but she successfully negotiated equal pay for herself.
