Gender Discrimination in Hollywood

The gender pay gap is also one of the major issues that contribute to discrimination in the industry. This has been a long-standing issue in Hollywood, despite the progression of women right and equality. In the article "The Gender Wage Gap: Cause, Consequences, and Remedies," Yaveline Aly explains some of the major elements that lead to the discrimination between male and female pay gap. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act banished the sperate pay between men and women in the same workplace.

This equal act protected everyone by law, regardless of gender identity. People have the right to earn the same salary for equal work. However, in today's labor market, women still receive an average of 80 cents for every dollar that men paid. Aly believes this phenomenon is due to the gender bias that occurred back in the old day. She explains that before women enter the workforce, men were already abased. Motherhood is also a part of the gender pay gap existed in the past. Women often enter and leave their work frequently to take care of the child, which made men became the main worker in the labor force. Furthermore, occupations are another key element that makes female earned less money than male. For example, women most likely to settle their jobs in the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy, while men tend to work at a higher pay-scale work. Indeed, these practices have turned the gender differences in income to a stereotype.

Hollywood has proven the substantial bias exists in the way gap between male and female. In the article "The Hollywood Wage Gap Isn't Getting Better but Actress Are Putting Back" article, Yohana Desta shares that Michelle William, four-time Oscars nominees, made 1,000 dollars less than her male counterpart, Mark Wahlberg, in the movie "All the Money in the World" re-shoot. The story of Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams was another center of the wage gap debate in the film industry. While they were both well-respected Oscars nominees for the roles in the "American Hustle" film back in 2013, they both had received 2 percent less of the film's profit in comparing with their co-stars. For many years, females have always received a smaller amount of payment without much explanation. Despite the fact that these actresses are more well-known with numerous decorated awards, the wage gap between them and their co-stars still remains large. The discrimination in wage gap had resulted in many disadvantages that women face during their career. For example, according to Desta, William and Wahlberg are both represented by W. M. E, but the differences in earning made Wahlberg's reputation as a tough negotiator.

Another example, Mark Wahlberg, the highest-paid actor, made 68 million dollars in 2017, meanwhile, Emma Stone, also an Oscars winner, the highest-paid actress, made just 26 million dollars. This stereotype has a severe impact on women's position and salary negotiation. As a result, female actresses are paid at a fraction of their male colleagues earned. Despite all their handworks, women still labeled as a lower status in the industry. To clarify the bias that exists in the film industry, a new survey shows that men dialogue is normally longer than female in various type of movies. Women are still treated as second-class citizens when it comes to the big screen. A research by Jeff Gou, "Researchers have found a major problem with "The Little Mermaid" and others Disney movies," presents the dialogues between male and female portrayal in Disney scene. Jeff believes that male characters have more speaking roles than female ones, regardless of the role-playing. Since the first Disney princess movies were released in 1937, the female speaking roles still remain unchanged. His research suggested men characters had significantly out spoken women characters in A Little Mermaid movie. Since then, man has often got the best lines, while women even spoke lesser in the followed Disney princess movies.

Things eventually get better when the movie "Tangled" released in 2010. Both women and men in this movie were given lines equally. Jeff Gou also pointed out that almost 80% of speaking role were women in the movie "Brave," 2012. This positive change has not stayed for long till the next princess movie published, "Frozen," 2013. Anil Ramakrishna also mentioned that male actors have a longer speaking script as nearly twice as many roles and dialogues compare to women actress. The study used machine learning, which made by Google and the University of Southern California, to measure gender equality over 53,000 dialogues segment from more than 7,000 characters. The result shows that 37,000 dialogues were belonged to men, while women had just over 15,000. He also found that men speaking roles contain more words related to death, achievement and swear words compare to women. In addition, when the study removed female characters nodes from the majority movie genres, the plot did not change the movie outcome. This could be understood as women speaking roles are not as important as men do, and the number of men speaking roles seems to be set as the industry norm.

Did you like this example?

283

12