Hollywood’s Hidden Pay Gap: Why Actresses Still Earn Less for the Same Roles

In 2019, Michelle Williams shocked the world by revealing that she was paid 1,000 times less than her male costar, Mark Wahlberg, for reshoots on the movie All the Money in the World. Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million, while Williams was only paid $80 a day for 10 days of reshoots. The backlash was immediate, with hundreds of people, including Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain, demanding answers from the studio. The controversy even made its way to the halls of Congress, with Williams speaking at an event for Equal Pay Day to advocate for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. It seemed like Hollywood finally had to answer for the pay inequity that actresses had been facing for years—and then… silence.

It’s the same song and dance we’ve seen dozens of times before and dozens of times since. We saw it in the early 2000s, when Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev was one of the lowest-paid regulars in a series where she routinely played multiple characters. We saw it in 2016 with the X-Files reboot, when Gillian Anderson, who plays Scully, was offered a fraction of the salary given to David Duchovny, who plays her partner Mulder.

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We saw it in 2021, when Jennifer Lawrence, in an interview with Vogue, joked about the $5 million pay gap between her and Leonardo DiCaprio for the movie Don’t Look Up: “I’m still not going to get paid as much as that guy, because of my vagina.” And we saw it as recently as 2024, when the highest-paid man in Hollywood, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, made $57 million more than the highest-paid woman, Nicole Kidman. Actresses are constantly pointing out the inequality of their pay, only to be met with the same empty platitudes about “doing better” from Hollywood.

These problems grow tenfold when we discuss the plight of women of color in Hollywood. In 2019, award-winning actress Mo’Nique sued Netflix for discrimination after they offered her over 20 times less for a comedy special than a white female comedian. Similar discrepancies have been called out by the likes of Octavia Spencer, Taraji P. Henson, and Keke Palmer. Viola Davis, the holder of an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy, put it best: “I have a career that’s probably comparable to Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Sigourney Weaver… yet I am nowhere near them. Not as far as money, not as far as job opportunities, nowhere close to it.”

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When people point out the difference in pay between actors and actresses, a common rebuttal is that actors are more well-known. In the example of Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, one Reddit user wrote, “Jennifer Lawrence earning less is appropriate because while she is an audience draw, she’s less of a draw than Leo and that can be proven statistically.” It is true that, in many cases, actresses may be less famous than their male counterparts and thus earn less money. However, what this comment fails to address is the “why.” Why are actors, on average, more ubiquitous than actresses?

The most prominent reason for this discrepancy is the fact that there are, on average, more lead roles available for men than women. Only four of the highest-grossing domestic movies in the last 25 years have had a female lead, and none starred a woman of color as the primary protagonist. In 2024, the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that 39% of major characters in top-grossing films were female—only a 5% increase from 2015. Superstardom is ultimately determined by opportunity. If there are fewer opportunities for women in leading roles, then it is harder for women to achieve a level of superstardom that allows them to be paid as much as their male counterparts.

Fewer women in front of the camera is usually caused by there being fewer women behind it. According to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s annual Boxed In report, in 2024, 20% of writers, 16% of directors, and 22% of executive producers working on the top 250 highest-grossing domestic films were female. In general, the percentage of women working behind the scenes on these films was around 23%.

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The statistics get even more grim when we factor race into the equation. In 2017, USC Annenberg’s Inclusion in the Director’s Chair report examined 1,000 top films from 2007–2016 and found that only 7 of the 1,114 directors were women of color. Though the barriers facing white women and women of color when it comes to equal pay have the same root cause—a lack of representation behind the camera—it’s important to acknowledge that the effects are much more severe for women of color.

The answer to the question of why actresses make less money than actors has always been sexism—but not individual sexism. It’s a horrible domino effect: there are fewer female producers, directors, and writers working on major projects, which leads to fewer leading roles for actresses, which causes actresses to not be seen as equals to their male counterparts, which leads to Hollywood paying actresses less than actors. It’s a system that seems designed to infuriate and dishearten women in the industry.

Actresses don’t make less money than actors because individual studio executives decide to pay them less. The problem is institutional and thus much harder to root out. There is no easy solution to the problem of pay inequality in Hollywood, but a difficult problem is not an impossible one. It may take years of hard questions and restructuring to resolve this issue, but the work is necessary to ensure true gender equality in Hollywood.

by Abigail Hogewood