HBO’s President of Programming, Casey Bloys, says HBO has fixed all of its gender pay disparity issues.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bloys said the Time’s Up movement led to a systematic review of pay across all HBO shows. “We’ve proactively gone through all of our shows,” he explained. “In fact, we just finished our process where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay; and where there were, if we found any, we corrected it going forward.”
Reese Witherspoon, one of the most prominent voices in the Time’s Up movement, has a starring role on the HBO show Big Little Lies, which received record ratings, critical acclaim, and multiple awards. After the success of the first season, all of the lead female actors reportedly received “sizeable” raises, including a reported $1 million per episode for Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, who also serve as executive producers on the series.
HBO isn’t the only company working to correct their gender pay gap. Starbucks (SBUX), Apple (AAPL), Salesforce, Intel (CRM), and Adobe (ADBE) are among companies that say they have reached full pay parity after working to address the pay gap since before the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements.
Bloys also addressed a fellow HBO executive’s comment on stage at a conference in Israel that negotiations for season two of Big Little Lies had “raped” the company from a budgetary standpoint. He said the executive had chosen his words poorly and that the rest of the HBO staff felt that the show had been worth every penny. He added that the executive’s comments had led to wider internal conversations about the word “raped” and why it was used.
