Why men make more than women in Hollywood

by Maria Puente

Is the campaign to close the Hollywood gender pay gap stalled? The gap is still wide - wider even than that for average working women - and older female stars have it even worse, according to new figures.

This is not news to anyone in Hollywood, particularly women. But it's getting way more Hollywood buzz now in part thanks to agitation by such boldfaced names as Oscar winners Cate Blanchett, Patricia Arquette and Jennifer Lawrence.

"The fact that people are paying attention to this is what's new - it's only in the last couple of years and only since the actresses started talking about it," says activist Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood website which tracks this issue.

"What's happening now is that women in Hollywood are emboldened to talk about gender discrimination - you can't turn a blind eye to this issue anymore."

People were talking about it because once again, annual Hollywood earning data compiled by Forbes magazine illustrates the pay disparity. The magazine's list of top-earning male stars shows that Lawrence, who topped the magazine's female stars list with $46 million, earned only about 71% of what the top male star, Dwayne Johnson, earned, at $64.5 million. Lawrence would be only the 6th-highest-paid star if the male and female lists were combined.

For comparison purposes, the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent calculations of median average pay for women and men, in September 2015, found that women make about 79 cents for every dollar paid to men, a statistic that hasn't changed much in half-dozen years. That means ordinary working women are slightly better off in these sorts of calculations than the likes of Lawrence, star of one of the most lucrative box-office movie franchises, The Hunger Games.

Forbes calculates the stars' earnings between June 1, 2015 and June 1, 2016, before taxes and before the deduction of management fees, using data from Nielsen, Box Office Mojo and IMDb, and from interviews with agents, managers and lawyers. These calculations are not based on the box office revenues of the stars' movies.

The latest list, which repeats patterns from previous years, illustrates other discrepancies, such as the one for age: All of the top 10 male earners are over 40 compared to only half the top 10 women earners, which includes Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Aniston, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts and Amy Adams.

So why is the pay gap in Hollywood still a reality? Because it's still a reality in the larger culture, says Martha Lauzen, head of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

"If those larger culture under-values women's contributions, it is no surprise that the film studios do the same," Lauzen says. "Contrary to popular belief, in many ways the mainstream film industry remains a staunch supporter and reinforcer of the status quo, particularly when we are talking about gender, race, and similar issues." Among the truisms Hollywood embraces is the idea that male stars are better box-office draws than women stars, she says.

"It remains part of the conventional wisdom in the mainstream film industry, in spite of a growing body of research" that shows instead it's "the size of the budget, not the sex of the protagonists or filmmaker, that determines box office grosses," Lauzen says.

Cathy Schulman, Oscar-winning veteran producer and president of Women In Film, Los Angeles (most recently head of production at STX, where her film Bad Moms is a summer hit "must see" for women audiences), says there is a "round-robin" of problems behind pay inequity, including male-favoring global audiences, unconscious bias, and the length of time it takes women to get their next paying industry job compared to men. But one bottom line, she says, is that "women actors aren't given pay raises at the same rate as men are - it's just a fact." She says the in-flux payment system for Hollywood talent is based on "previous quotes," or whatever the talent was paid in a previous job coupled with success of the movie.

"What we're seeing is that when people are getting raises, it's directly related to whether it follows a hit movie," Schulman says."But the jumps in 'quote' are way bigger for men than they are for women at the moment, and it has to do with who is doing the negotiating and who is buying the talent. We've not seen the agencies, studios and financers fight for that kind of quote-doubling with women as much as men."

- USA TODAY