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I’m highlighting this particular example because, even though I don’t have kids and have never had the school call, I have found that the bosses I’ve had who were women were more understanding than male bosses when I’ve needed to leave to deal with a family issue.
Whether employees who work for women are happier than those who work for men would be an interesting subject for study, but the sample size is too small. As Sandi Toksvig points out in her TED talk there are twice as many men named Dave running Fortune 500 companies than women.
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Yes, one can become an RN without a four-year degree, but with prerequisites and taking board examination–it’s closer to three years. Engineering degrees take four years, far short of the better part of a decade that you’re citing above. Furthermore, many RNs continue their education (and I’m not writing about continuing state-mandated hours) while working to complete their BSN and MSN.
(eta: the better part of that @namenotreserved had in the quote above, which I understand better to mean six or more years)
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I can’t remember where I read this first… or even if its upthread or not…
Everyone agrees that doctors are prestigious and high earners right? (At least on par with Engineers right?)
Except in Russia. Where its a female dominated field and they get paid shit.
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While watching Nikki Haley addressing the UN, I mentioned to my better half that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female politician/official from Russia. Even when Russia was the USSR.
It totally doesn’t surprise me that the Russian culture believes that being a doctor is a job for women and they should get paid less.
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When I was working for the labor archivist last year, she was curating a collection of oral histories from nurses who got their degrees at the Grady school of nursing. One thing I remember one of the women saying is that when men began to become nurses the pay began to go up over all.
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Also seems appropriate to drop this here as it’s heading into the women in STEM territory:
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If people are asking for non-market means of setting pay, how is capitalism not the issue?
That seems pretty rational and fiscally goal oriented to me.
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.
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.
Well, there’s your first mistake. Walt Disney Pictures bet around $300 million on John Carter and $225 million on The Lone Ranger being franchise-igniting hits. Somebody there thought century-old icons were due for a fat comeback, against all evidence to the contrary. And Disney knows their market as well as anyone does. Look at how they’ve done with their first two Star Wars movies. They learned a lesson that George Lucas forgot: don’t blow all your budget on VFX and production design while forgetting to start out with a non-stupid script. That was all they had to remember, and so they did. But the hit factory, however well researched, is always a crap shoot. Even Pixar’s record ain’t perfect, though it’s better than anyone else’s.
No, a better description would be “self-serving and dishonest.” Do you suppose New Line’s Lord of the Rings movies were profitable? How about 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars movies? The studios apparently didn’t think so, and had to be sued by certain actors, writers, and a director in order to pay up what was owed them. Is that simple, properly-operating capitalism at work? Is that sound, rational fiscal policy? Maybe only if the scam is still profitable if it covers the legal bills too?
I don’t think your understanding of how capitalism works accurately reflects the reasons why women actors are typically paid less than their male counterparts. When Jim Carrey became the first actor to be paid $20 million for a movie role (for The Cable Guy in 1996), he was obviously the hottest property in town. He’d already been paid $10 million of the entire $17 million budget of Dumb and Dumber a couple years previously, and that movie had gone on to make $247 million… and not really because it had Jeff Daniels in it. The Cable Guy only made $103 million, so Columbia made less than half the box office on The Cable Guy than New Line made on Dumb and Dumber while investing twice as much in Carrey. Did that make him a crappier investment? Hell no. Arguably, the box office for The Cable Guy would have been a tiny fraction of what it ended up making, if any other actor had been cast in Carrey’s role.
But it established a precedent: that became Carrey’s price, and eventually other actors got up into that range. But it’s always a crapshoot. The Majestic tanked. So did The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. The Number 23 didn’t do all that great. Carrey isn’t always worth what he costs. At that level, who could be?
But I stray afield. Let me continue in a moment.
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The people who make these deals, I believe, do not consider themselves to be using their power and discretion to depress women’s wages. They just want to make profitable movies. Hopefully good ones, too, but nobody wants to finance an expensive masterpiece that sells no tickets. Nobody sets out to make another Heaven’s Gate.
A hot script crosses a producer’s desk. Looks great. Plenty of agents have read it, and it’s a hot property. Can we get Tom Cruise for it? I hear he’s available next spring since that Spielberg thing fell through. I dunno, he’s getting $32 million for MI 8, will he take a pay cut for this? We can afford him if we pay $18 million for the love interest. Can we get J Law for that? Not anymore, but send an offer to so and so… etc., etc. It’s all a dance, who can we get, who’s hot now, who can we afford, who’s more trouble than they’re worth, whose star (and price) has risen out of reach, who’s new and hungry and exploitable (or recovering from a bomb and pliable and negotiable) and all these factors don’t rely on gotta-pay-the-dudes-more sexism so much as they fall back on always-did-pay-the-dudes-more sexism, and since Cruise and Carrey won’t necessarily volunteer for a pay cut, the alternative road to parity is for the studios to resolve to pay the women more… and you can predict how quickly they fall over themselves to pay anyone more than they have to, or more than they’ve paid in the past.
The institutional sexism already started the women on a lower rung of the ladder. The next thing it does is shorten their working careers. Dudes like Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood played romantic leads in their sixties. A female actor finds the job offers drying up before she’s forty, more often than not. Studios take advantage of this without overtly trying to be dicks about it. They’ll say the roles aren’t there, those scripts don’t get written, those films don’t get made because audiences won’t buy those tickets (and again, they’re shocked to find out the opposite on the rare occasions when such movies somehow get made anyway). And all the while the studios are passively following the path of least resistance toward what they suppose will be the greatest short-term profits, and thus actively perpetuating the cultural narrative that female actors are worth less than males because they always have been, because female characters are less compelling, and female stories are less interesting. These things are so, think the blinkered studio minds, because they always have been so, not because we want them to be so, and we just give the public what the public wants.
And Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect 2 were utterly inexplicable anomalies. Who could have predicted people would actually watch those? Neither one had Jim Carrey in it, or even Dwayne Johnson.
I guess my larger point is that women have more than one sexist obstacle in their way in this particular slice of the workforce. Their careers are often shortened for sexist reasons (too old for the ingenue parts, sweetie, you’ve been replaced by the new hot young thang!), which gives them less time to build up the body of work and reputation to command top dollar so they have to rise fast or peak relatively low. Carrey got his $20 million breakthrough at 34, whereas J Law became the highest-paid actress in the world at 25. Her career may very well be as sturdy and long as Meryl Streep’s or Helen Mirren’s… but female careers like those two are exceptions to the rule.
And then there’s that fact that 71% of the speaking roles are male. If nothing else, there’s more competition for the female parts, further depressing wages. And that lack of female roles is another sexist part of Hollywood culture, directly derived from American culture at large.
It’s a profound and obvious problem that needs to be addressed.
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Lookit you with all your facts and figures and numbers! Not just a pretty face!!
Thanks. 
Its almost like sexism has been happening for years and is so deeply entrenched in our culture that it’ll take a concerted effort on every bodies part to root it out and end!
I assume Will Smith is the highest paid Black American Male actor. But who is the female equivalent? Just to drag us bakc onto topic. 
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You continue to describe the way capitalism is theoretically supposed to work in an idealized and rational system. We are describing the situation as it actually stands today.
In the real world the amount of money people are paid often has almost no relation to the value they provide. The Wall Street executives whose decisions destroyed companies and dragged down the world economy in 2008 were (and still are) some of the highest-paid people on the planet.
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New band name.
Therein is the issue; that person is arguing pure ideological theory in the complete absence of practicality and basic reality.
The way things are supposed to work in theory is seldom how they actually work in practice.
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Used to be Halle Berry, but I’m having trouble finding recent stats. There are no Black actresses on Forbes’ top ten list, and haven’t been for a decade. Mo’Nique got a fair amount of shade for pointing out that she was paid only $50k plus a wee slice of back end profits for Precious in 2009, a movie that grossed $47 million domestically on a $10 million budget.
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The true believers will always say that we’re just not trying hard enough.
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