Double Standards of the Female Actress

For many years, there has been an ongoing argument as to why women do not receive the same compensation as men do for similar jobs. There have been several suggestions as to why women may not do as well in the work field including having family duties, not having the same assertive demeanor as men, having superiors believe they are incapable of certain tasks, etc. However, in Hollywood, the stakes are different. Male actors are still paid more than female actresses for roles that are similar with all other factors considered such as box office earnings, actor’s experience, etc. With this said, this gap in pay between genders is well over a few hundred million dollars. For example, according to Forbes, the top ten highest earning female actresses collectively made $186 million while the top ten highest paid actors made $748.5 million all together. In other words, these group of female actresses earned 24.8 cents less than men for ever dollar earned.

In addition to female actresses not getting paid as male actors, female actresses’ careers do not typically last as long as males. Women’s acting careers seem to peak at an early age from men, but from this point, the number of roles they get after they reach the age of 30 seems to drop drastically. In comparison, men have been shown to continually increase the number of roles they receive until they reach about 46 years if age and then still obtain a good number of roles thereafter. It is not until both female and male actors reach the age of 80 that they finally are given the same number of roles.

What can be gathered from this is a couple things. This shows that across the board, celebrity or not, there is still a huge gap in pay between the sexes in which men come out on top statistically. It does not matter kind of job it is, almost all fields of work are affected by this. Lastly, this implies the double standard of beauty that is set for women while men are seen to be attractive or even more attractive as they grow older. But, for women, there only seems to be a short cutoff period which is why, in Hollywood, their peak of their career is earlier in life and typically goes downhill from that point because of the aging process.