Even Hollywood isn’t immune to America’s pay parity problem.
Just ask Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who kicked off her Bollywood career in 2002 before falling into Hollywood’s spotlight. She said that the 2023 Prime Video action drama she’s starring in, Citadel, marked the first time she was paid the same as her male costar.
“I might get into trouble for [saying this], depending on who’s watching,” the actress, 40, said during her conversation with Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke at last month’s South by Southwest Film Festival, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for 22 years now, and I have done almost 70-plus features and two TV shows. But when I did Citadel, it was the first time in my career that I had pay parity.”
Now, in a more recent interview with an AP News reporter at Citadel’s series premiere in London on Tuesday, Chopra Jonas admitted she didn’t anticipate having a pay parity conversation at all going into Citadel, even over two decades into the business. “I didn’t even think about asking for it,” she said. “My manager and my agents at UTA had a conversation around parity because, they said, ‘you’re a co-lead.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that doesn’t happen. That’s not how the industry works, because that’s never happened to me.’”
Her manager insisted they ask for it anyway, and their gumption paid off. Chopra Jonas hopes Amazon’s move sets a precedent; she said she’s been paid the same as her male costars on every job since Citadel.
Chopra Jonas isn’t alone in experiencing pay inequity. Millions of working women in America earned an average of 82% of what men earned last year; that figure is even lower for women of color. That persistent gap will cost women—even the highest-paid among them—about $90,000 in lifetime earnings this year. Things are unlikely to fully even out for another 130 years, according to the World Economic Forum. The picture is no rosier in Hollywood.
“Inequality affects everything. It’s a web; we need to understand how destabilizing it is,” actress Patricia Arquette told Fortune in 2015, after she spent the entirety of her Oscar acceptance speech decrying women’s pay inequality. “The pay gap happens in 98% of occupations, and it touches on every aspect of our lives. I just can’t see how we can have a healthy middle class without equal pay.”
We need more women at the top
Dedicated researchers at the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau still find themselves at a loss about what lets pay inequality continue unabated. But one solution might be putting more women in positions of power—where they’ll ideally make room for other women, Chopra Jonas said this week. “I wonder if Jennifer Salke, who’s the head of Amazon Studios, was not a woman, would the decision still have been the same?” she said in the AP News interview.
She was echoing the comments she made a month prior at SXSW: “I’m laughing about this, but it’s kind of nuts,” she had said. “I put in the same amount of investment and work, but I get paid much less. But the ease in which Amazon Studios said, ‘That’s what you deserve, you are co-leads, that’s just fair,’ and I was like, ‘You’re right, it’s fair.’ And I wonder: Did that happen because there are very few female decision-makers in Hollywood?”
Salke, one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in 2021, said at SXSW that she couldn’t speak to how the outcome may have differed were she not studio head, but gave credit to her executive team. Salke said she has “great male and female allies” at Amazon Studios.
Since arriving, it’s been her mission to promote equality at every level. (Salke replaced former head Roy Price in 2018 after he was ousted for sexual harassment allegations.)
“Having somebody like me, who celebrates women and diversity, come in is a huge first step,” Salke said at the time. Her first few weeks on the job, she said, she invited both executives and entry-level workers—many of them women—to her office sofa to discuss their feelings. “I [wanted] to be someone who could listen and be an advocate for them.”
It’s a good thing more women are taking over CEO roles—assuming they, following Salke’s lead, are moving to fix pay inequality where they find it.
