Gender Pay Gap

It appears that she and everyone else was told that no one except the crew was going to get paid for the reshoot. Ridley Scott didn’t get paid. It was almost a charity thing. Wahlberg and his agent were assholes, demanding more money and no doubt holding the reshoot hostage. The problem was that no one got told that he was not agreeing to do it for nothing.

This one is not a good example. There are plenty of good examples, though.

If there was no gap, then no one would have any problem with the laws being proposed. They would be willing to report and prove that there was no gender gap.

It’s like BLM. If cops didn’t think there was bias against black people in policing, there would be not reason to not be working with them to prove it. Instead, they vilify them.

…I was waiting for someone to point this out.

Here’s the thing though. People deny the gender pay gap exist. And they go to extraordinarily extreme lengths in order to argue that the gap doesn’t exist. And in this thread: rather than actually reading my cite and coming to the same determination that you did, people didn’t read my cite and instead argued “the gap actually exists and that its a good thing and if you don’t like it you should women should leave the industry.”

I’ve cited a couple of what you may consider “better” examples. But this particular example did its job.

How do you know they didn’t try to negotiate and they were told “Nope. Scale and that’s it!”

You have yet to cite a single example.

…we actually know they didn’t negotiate. This actually isn’t disputed by anyone.

I didn’t say it was disputed. I asked how do you know it?

…because I’ve read several stories about this, cited them in this thread, and they explain what happened? How did you not know this?

And this seems to me like a strawman. Your first paragraph does not seem to contain any statements made in this thread, but merely assumptions. Then your second paragraph knocks down those assumptions that were never said.

The issue with Williams is that SHE was upset at the disparity because she believed the situation was misrepresented to her. She was told everyone was doing it for scale, and so she chose to do so as well. But it turns out, one of the people involved (the male principle actor and thus equal to her in all but gender) was not doing it for scale. ]

So none of this is about what Banquet Bear thinks she should have been paid. It’s about Williams herself thinking they lied to her, and thus she did not in fact enter into the contract of her own free will What she did agree to of her own free will was not actually what happened.

So, rather than defend her personal autonomy, you are (possibly accidentally) removing her autonomy by ignoring her statements on the matter.

That said, I do agree it is a poor example, due to additional complicating factors that make it more difficult to tell if gender discrimination was a factor. Sure, Wahlberg says he didn’t know it was supposed to be for scale, which would imply that the company didn’t tell him that. And you could argue that, since she and he are both leads, they both should have been told equally.

But it’s difficult to prove those assumptions. He could have been told but didn’t listen. His agent could have been told but didn’t pass it on to him, and was just more aggressive. (Just because the agents work at the same company doesn’t mean they have the same negotiation style.) Or they didn’t mention everyone was doing it for scale for reasons other than discrimination.

Do I suspect discrimination may have played a factor? Yes. But it’s not clear cut. And at least Wahlberg donated what he got to charity to make up for it. And then Williams was paid the same as her male costars in her next role.

So she got exactly what she wanted. Sure seems she negotiated quite well, if you ask me.

Women ask for raises as often as men but get them less often

For women, asking for a raise is damned if you do or don’t

Maybe Williams’ agents know something you don’t? They are the pros and as you said, they got it for Wahlberg. Do you think that they didn’t do their job or just patted Williams on the head and told her to be a little doll and go home?

There is only one Wahlberg and if a movie wants him, they have to pay him that type of money or he makes a different movie where they will pay him that type of money. Williams doesn’t have that type of bargaining power.

Williams seems to be a fine enough actor, but she has nowhere near the star power of Wahlberg. Not even close. It would be like saying that something nefarious was going on because a golf tournament pays Tiger Woods a bundle more to show up than would pay me to show up.

If it wasn’t Williams, but say, Steve Buscemi, would you think that something unfair happened?

I’ve read all the cites you posted in this thread, and none of them say that her agents didn’t negotiate. Maybe you can point out where the articles say that?

I did read this though: "Williams previously told USA TODAY that when Scott’s team called to request her time for the reshoot, “I said I’d be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me. And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort.”

Which seems to me that she voluntarily gave up any salary for the reshoots.

Well, I personally find that very sad.

I don’t have a handy cite, but from our past debates it seems that women who remained childless and therefore who did not take substantial time off take from the workforce to raise children, had pay rates equal to men.

If this is true, and please comment if it is not, then there does not seem to be a gender pay gap in the sense that companies are discriminating against women. It seems a legitimate reason to pay someone less who has been away from the workforce for four years than you would pay someone, male or female, to do the job who had been continuously in the industry, learning and gaining experience.

It still seems like you are using the value of the input to determine the value of the output. How much someone gets paid is not the same as how much they actually contribute to the economy.

A trivial counterexample is the volunteer, who doesn’t get paid anything, but still provides something of monetary value to the company they volunteer for.

In fact, the highest value deals are those in which someone pays little but gets a lot out of it. A high value movie is one where you pay less than you get out of the movie, for example.

Mothers actually have a fairly high value, as their mothering produces citizens that can then participate in the economy. Their output is higher than the input, which is just that which is spent on the public good.

I would argue that, if you want to check someone’s value to the economy, that value must be made by comparing output and input. I’m not exactly sure how to compare them, as both division and subtraction have their merits, but you can’t completely ignore one or the other.

Otherwise you get the absurd example of the volunteer whose work allows companies to make millions (e.g. with open source software) providing less value to the economy than someone who gets paid a million dollars but fails and winds up costing everyone money.

That second guy is much less valuable.

That may be true, but it seems like there are some people who think that employees shouldn’t get paid more simply because they’ve been at the company longer.

I think you are missing the “supply” side of the supply v. demand equation which sets values for not only goods but services.

Garbage men, for example, provide a very valuable service. Imagine if no one collected garbage and it just festered everywhere in the community. But because it takes no special skill and that pretty much any able bodied man (or woman) can do the job means that the pay will not be as high as another skill which may not be as important for society in the absolute sense.

Athletes, on the other hand, provide a very marginal benefit to society. If football disappeared tomorrow, I might lose a source of entertainment, but I would still largely go on as before. Yet these guys are paid millions. And that is because only a very select few guys in the entire world have the skill set to perform at such a high level.

So just because you can point to very important jobs with low pay doesn’t mean that there is something nefarious going on.

Well, as a small business owner, I understand the value of consistency. If I have a good employee or even an average employee, I don’t want them to get sniped by another company and make me undergo the costs of finding someone to replace them, bring them up to speed on company policies, and then wait to see if I made a wrong choice because they show up drunk, call out a lot, or otherwise cannot do the job so I have to go through the process again. Or they make a mistake that costs the company money.

If I have a serviceable employee, it makes sense to keep their pay at or above market rate to give them an incentive to stay.

Well, I think that too. But some in this thread seem to think that a new hire should be paid the same as a person whose been there for 5 or 10 or 15 years. It’s strange to me.

…we are talking about an industry that out of over 400 total nominees for the best director oscar only 5 women have ever been nominated and only 1 woman has ever won. We are talking about an industry where 94% of women have said they have experienced sexual harassment or assault. We are talking about an industry where 50% of film school graduates are women but only 1.9% of them ever get the opportunity to direct big budget films. So do I believe they literally patted Williams on the head and told her to be a little doll and go home? Nope. But I don’t think your characterization is too far off the truth. Its an industry that has historically and continues to devalue the contributions of women. Its baked into it culture.

She’s got significantly more bargaining power now than she had before all of this got made public.

Williams has won 1 more Golden Globe than Wahlberg has and is one of the finest actors of her generation. This isn’t about you showing up with Tiger Woods. Its Serena Williams playing in a tournament with Roger Federer and paying Federer 1.5 million dollars and paying Serena Williams with a gift bag.

Women almost never get offered the same roles as men. Women don’t get lead roles in movies like “Boogie Nights” and “Planet of the Apes” and “Three Kings” and “The Departed.” “Star Power” is a metric that women (currently) will never be able to match. Its a metric that inherently values male actors more than female actors.

Things are changing though. More men are refusing to take roles/taking paycuts to force parity with their female costars. With movies like Captain Marvel demonstrating that women can lead an action movie and make billions of dollars things will start to change. We don’t have to accept the status quo.

If Steve Buscemi was top billed in a movie and got paid scale while the person who got last billing got paid 1.5 million dollars I think Steve Buscemi would be absolutely fucking ropable and yes of course I would think that would be unfair. Let me know when that happens and I will join you in your outrage.