Today is #EqualPayDay. That means a lot of people are talking about money — specifically, how women continue to earn less than men.
According to the ACLU, women earn between $8,000 to $23,000 less than men annually, a figure that changes according to race:
Today is #EqualPayDay, when pay for all women catches up to the pay for all men from the previous year.
Here’s how the pay gap breaks down: pic.twitter.com/ysVyLQoqKU
— ACLU (@ACLU) April 10, 2018
Just yesterday, however, a federal appeals court ruled that employers can’t use salary history as justification for paying a woman less than a man doing a similar job. Doing so, the court ruled, violates the spirit of the Equal Pay Act.
So things may be slowly changing — though clearly not quickly nor dramatically enough. To keep the conversation going, here are nine famous Jewish women, many of whom are moms, who have a lot to say about the gender and wage gap:
Mila Kunis in an essay for A Plus on why she started her own production company:
“Throughout my career, there have been moments when I have been insulted, sidelined, paid less, creatively ignored, and otherwise diminished based on my gender. And always, I tried to give people the benefit of the doubt; maybe they knew more, maybe they had more experience, maybe there was something I was missing. I taught myself that to succeed as a woman in this industry I had to play by the rules of the boy’s club. But the older I got and the longer I worked in this industry, the more I realized that it’s bullshit! And, worse, that I was complicit in allowing it to happen.”
Patricia Arquette at the 2015 Academy Awards:
“It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”
Gwyneth Paltrow in Variety on salary inequality:
“It can be frustrating. It can be painful. Your salary is a way to quantify what you’re worth. If men are being paid a lot more for doing the same thing, it feels shitty.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking for the dissenting justices in Ledbetter v. Goodyear:
“In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”
Drew Barrymore on the pay gap in Hollywood at CTV News:
“It should be equal and that’s that. I don’t think there’s much more to say on it.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bgxat-iguAH/
Emmy Rossum on inequalities in every industry at The Daily Beast:
“This is across the board in every industry, how women are paid versus how men are paid. And then you take it further, that kind of bias extends not just to gender but to race, ethnicity, religion.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BfL-iFQBSXF/
Natalie Portman on Ashton Kutcher being paid three times as much for their 2011 romantic comedy No Strings Attached in The Daily Mail:
“His [quote] was three times higher than mine so they said he should get three times more. I wasn’t as pissed as I should have been. I mean, we get paid a lot, so it’s hard to complain, but the disparity is crazy.”
Chelsea Handler on CNN about asking for what you want:
“I know what I want and I’ve asked for it. I have no problem saying I need this amount of money.”
Gal Gadot on making gender a non-issue:
“There’s a long way to go until we can make gender a nonissue… I don’t know if it’ll ever happen. I’m hoping it will, because life would be so much cooler and less complicated.”
Of course, let’s also not forget this Chelsea Handler joke:
Happy #EqualPayDay to everyone at @FoxNews, where the only way a woman gets equal pay is if she gets sexually harassed.
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) April 6, 2017
