Women have been demanding equal wages as their male counterparts since the nineteenth century, the time when they finally garnered courage to speak up about it.
The partiality even exists even in Bollywood where a rising actor like Ranbir Kapoor earns about 20-25 crore per film, whereas Anushka Sharma earns only about 6-8 crore.
WOMEN WHO FOUGHT AND SUCCEEDED IN GETTING THEIR RIGHT
But, some women continued to fight against this barbarous practice and only a few of them were successful. Yes, those are all the women (that we know of) who were successful in getting an equal pay:
- Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson was paid about the same amount as Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans in the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron. But even after countering the wage disparity, her co-stars starred in their own Marvel superhero franchises, but her character is yet to get a movie to shoulder. Also, apart from this, she did not get an equal pay in any other movie.
- Mika Brzezinski
The co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe found out that she was earning a whooping fourteen times less than her co-anchor Joe Scarborough, in 2008. She realised that this might be because Joe came from prime time and she did not, but she still could not fathom such a huge difference. Scarborough, once, put in some bonus that he earned for achieving ratings goal, into Brzezinski’s account, she told Huffpost in 2011. This made her take the decision of either making the director pay her equally or walking off the set. But, she “knew her value” and her final call of quitting the show, helped her “negotiate a new salary, that was somewhat closer to Scarborough”.
- Robin Wright
The “House of Cards” actress recently confessed to threaten the makers of the show to go public if she wasn’t paid equal to her co-star Kevin Stacey. She went on to say that she realised her character was more popular than Stacey’s at one point in the show. Capitalizing on this, she said, “You better pay me, or I am going to go public”, adding, that they finally gave in and raised her salary.
According to the PayScale data, “There is no industry where women earn equal to or more than men overall, even when controlling for all measured compensable factors.
REASONS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF WAGE GAP IN INDIA
India’s gender-based wage gap stays at 25.4%. The more educated a woman is the wider the gender gap.
Sexism at workplace is prevalent as statistics have shown that married and widowed women are paid much less than single women. This clearly follows the Indian mentality that a married woman cannot be an efficient worker as she has to take care of the household too.
Organisations give a plenty of redundant reasons for this like “disruption” in work due to childbirth and parenthood duties, women negotiate less convincingly for their salaries than men, and also because the competitors want to keep a uniform salary for women (which means that everybody is paying less).
This patriarchal norm takes away the agency from a woman, who has to face setbacks at the workplace, as she is not given the top position just because her family would hold her back from some projects.
Well, according to the World Economic Forum, it might take about 118 years or until 2133 to close the global gender wage gap. But, we could raise our voice and do our bit, who knows if we manage to do it in a 100 years!
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