Op-ed recommendation: Why white women must make the equal-pay fight more inclusive

[namenotreserved]

@Auld_Lang_Syne

The reasons people have issues with the way you have been bringing up the death of capitalism is that you seem to be presenting it as the only option other than just shrugging our collective shoulders.

If people are asking for non-market means of setting pay, how is capitalism not the issue?

@Donald_Petersen

No, you can’t presume that. That might make sense if Hollywood Accounting weren’t infamously irrational in all ways that it budgets and (especially) reports profits and losses with an eye toward minimizing residual payments and net profit shares.

That seems pretty rational and fiscally goal oriented to me.

@Brainspore

They also don’t tend to pay any more than they have to. As long as studios can get away with paying female actors less than their male counterparts then they will continue to do so. They can get away with it because the practice is industry-wide; it’s difficult for someone like Natalie Portman to negotiate more money from Dreamworks if she’s just as likely to get shafted by any other major studio.

Except that she has multiple movies bidding for her, and can play them against her. It seems a bit absurd to suggest that she isn’t getting paid the most she’s worth. That’s the one and only thing capitalism is good at.

@anon61221983

Again, ask @Donald_Petersen, who actually works in the industry and might, just possibly, know something about how these things shape the industry in ways that might not seem obvious to those of us who don’t.

But he’s not betting any money on it, is he? When I see hundreds of millions of dollars being bet on something, I’m going to put a fairly high bar against someone who says it isn’t so.