Jennifer Lawrence Slams Hollywood's Gender Wage Gap

Jennifer Lawrence shared her disappointment with Hollywood in regard to Hollywood’s persistent gender pay gap. 

Jennifer Lawrence is the highest-paid actress in the world and yet she is paid millions of dollars less than her male co-stars. The Oscar-winning actress lashed out at Hollywood’s persistent gender pay gap in a new interview with Vogue. Lawrence said in a new Vogue cover story that such pay gaps remain frustrating overall, citing that she was paid less than her male co-stars on “American Hustle” in 2013 for a role which Lawrence earned an Oscar nod for. “It doesn’t matter how much I do,” she said. “I’m still not going to get paid as much as that guy, because of my vagina?” 

The Sony hack revealed she made far less than the likes of her male co-stars on “American Hustle,” while Vanity Fair revealed in 2021 that she earned $5 million less than Leonardo DiCaprio on “Don’t Look Up” despite sharing top billing with him. Lawrence told Vogue that all actors are often overpaid, but that doesn’t make the pay gap any less frustrating. 

“I’m extremely fortunate and happy with my deal,” Lawrence told Vanity Fair shortly before the movie’s release. “But in other situations, what I have seen — and I’m sure other women in the workforce have seen as well — is that it’s extremely uncomfortable to inquire about equal pay. And if you do question something that appears unequal, you’re told it’s not gender disparity, but they can’t tell you what exactly it is.”

This is not the first time Lawrence has expressed herself on the persistent gender pay gap. She has always been vocal about the issue and has addressed it on the stage very loudly. In 2015 The Oscar winner has spoken out about gender pay inequality in Hollywood – and she used Lena Dunham’s Lenny newsletter to do it. In an essay titled “Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co Stars?”, Lawrence writes: “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with d—-, I didn’t get mad at Sony.”

Lawrence adds that she “failed as a negotiator” because she “gave up early.”

“But if I’m honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight,” she writes. “I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.'" Lawrence goes on to describe her self-proclaimed failure to negotiate as a “young-person thing” and an element of her personality she’s “been working against for years."

"Based on the statistics, I don’t think I’m the only woman with this issue. Are we socially conditioned to behave this way?” she writes, noting that women have only been able to vote for about a century. “Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t ‘offend’ or ‘scare’ men?” 

On average, women earn about $1.1 million less than their male co-stars, according to 2017 research from three professors: Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez of the University of Huddersfield, Maria Navarro Paniagua of Lancaster University, and John S Heywood of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

For actors over 50, that gap is even wider: Older actresses earned almost $4 million less than male actors. Other studies have noted that women of color are significantly underpaid compared to white women.