Thankfully, she’s making some noise about it.
In an interview with British Vogue, Sienna Miller opened up about the time she was “offered less than half” of what her male co-star was being paid for a role in a play on Broadway in New York. When she tried to address the pay gap with the producer, she says she was told to “f*** off”.
“I said to the producer, who was extremely powerful, it’s not about money – it’s about fairness and respect, thinking they’d come back and say, ‘Of course, of course.’ But they didn’t. They just said, ‘Well f**k off then’,” Miller recalled in her interview for the December cover story of the fashion magazine.
She called it a “pivotal moment” in her career and said the interaction led to the realisation that she “had every right to be equally subsidised for the work that I would have done”.
This is not the first time the Anatomy of a Scandal star has shone a spotlight on pay inequity in her industry.
In 2020, she revealed that fellow actor Chadwick Boseman took money from his own salary on 21 Bridges to boost her pay to the number she had asked for.
Back in 2015, Miller turned down a return to Broadway because of, again, gender pay gap issues. “It was a play with just two of us on stage and I was offered less than half of what he was going to be paid. If it was two men, it wouldn’t probably happen. Sad, but I walked away,” she told Vogue at the time.
This time, however, something else stood out from Miller’s quotes on the topic. She talked about how “terrible” and “embarrassed” she felt for even bringing up the issue of pay with the producer and, even to this day, she decided not to name him because she “didn’t want to be mean”.
Read that again. She didn’t want to be mean to the guy who told her to “f*** off” when she dared suggest maybe she should get paid the same as her male co-star.
The same system that enables that producer to get away with that response also conditions women to feel bad about demanding what they are worth, to even bring up the topic with their bosses or managers.
The good news is that more and more women with a platform are speaking up about the gender pay gap in their industries. Earlier this year, Jennifer Lawrence said she knew she’d always be paid less than her male co-starts “because of my vagina”.
This is one of those very few occasions where Hollywood issues are not that far off the issues a lot of us face in our daily lives. Across New Zealand, the gender pay gap still sits at just over 9 per cent. This number feels even more depressing when you remember that the Equal Pay Act turned 50 years old this year. You know, the legislation makes it illegal to pay males and females different amounts for doing the same job? Yeah, the legislation is not legislating, at least not as hard as it should be. The gap means that, as of later this month, Pākehā women will be effectively working for free for the remainder of the year. When ethnicity is taken into account, the gap is even wider (Pasifika women are already working for free for the rest of 2022).
This gap is also a factor that leads so many women to be so worried about the cost of living. A Dynata poll conducted for the NZ Herald and released on Friday, as part of the Herald’s new series The New New Zealand: Rebuilding Better, showed that the majority of New Zealanders see the cost of living as the most important issue the country is facing right now. A higher proportion of women (65 per cent) than men (46 per cent) said the cost of living was the most important issue right now.
Last month, the MindTheGap campaign delivered a petition to Parliament calling on the Government to legislate mandatory reporting of gender and ethnic pay gaps as a vital way to address this inequity.
While it is true that we’ve come a long way, it also feels like we’ve got a really long way still to go - and that’s true whether you’re in Hollywood or Palmerston North. Women should not feel bad for asking for pay equity.
Things have got to change. A gender pay gap is not what I aim to have in common with Sienna Miller. I want the ability to pull off bangs, damn it.
