×

Our award-winning reporting has moved

Context provides news and analysis on three of the world’s most critical issues:

climate change, the impact of technology on society, and inclusive economies.

Hollywood's gender pay gap is 'crazy' - Natalie Portman

by Luke Mintz | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Thursday, 12 January 2017 15:18 GMT

Actress Natalie Portman arrives at the 74th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., January 8, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Image Caption and Rights Information

Portman paid three times less than her male co-star Ashton Kutcher for her role in the 2011 romantic comedy "No Strings Attached"

By Luke Mintz

LONDON, Jan 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - New complaints of discrimination have hit the film awards season after Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman slammed the gender pay gap as "crazy" - and said it was even worse in Hollywood than in other jobs.

In a magazine interview, Portman revealed that she was paid three times less than her male co-star Ashton Kutcher for her role in the 2011 romantic comedy "No Strings Attached".

"Compared to men, in most professions, women make 80 cents to the dollar," Portman told Marie Claire. "In Hollywood we are making 30 cents to the dollar."

The 35-year-old star - who won a best actress Oscar in 2011 for her role in "Black Swan" and plays Jackie Kennedy in a forthcoming biopic about the former U.S. First Lady - said the pay disparity was "crazy".

The World Economic Forum, a non-profit foundation, predicts the global gender pay disparity may take up to 170 years to close. The average global gap stood at 59 percent in 2016, it said in a report released last October.

Hollywood's gender pay gap was highlighted in 2015, when hacked documents from film studio Sony Pictures revealed major pay disparities between top actors.

They showed that U.S. actress Jennifer Lawrence was paid less than her male co-stars Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper in the 2013 black comedy "American Hustle".

Hacked emails showed that Bale and Cooper earned nine percent of the film's total profits, whilst Lawrence was only paid seven percent.

Lawrence later said she was "mad at herself" after learning about the pay gap because she had "failed as a negotiator".

Other movie stars - such as Sandra Bullock and Jessica Chastain - have also hit out at pay discrimination.

The 2017 awards season began on Sunday with the Golden Globes dinner in Beverly Hills, kicking off two months of red carpets and black tie events, culminating in the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 26.

Actress Meryl Streep turned her Golden Globe acceptance speech into a scathing commentary on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, stunning her audience into silence and grabbing headlines with her criticism of Trump's impersonation of a disabled newspaper reporter.

Last year, the Academy Awards were heavily criticised for picking an all-white lineup of best actor nominees, prompting boycotts from several big names, including Will Smith, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Spike Lee.

The criticism became widely associated with the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite.

(Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

-->