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The wage gap between the male and female actors in Bollywood is obscenely huge. Though they put the same amount of time and efforts.
The wage gap between the male and female actors in Bollywood is obscenely huge. This is despite comparable work and talent.
Differences in wages based on gender exist throughout the world. They are better documented and quantified in some countries and industries than others. The gap exists based on various stereotypes and assumptions such as women are less competent, likely to leave jobs for families and children, men need to make more money to support their families etc as well as economic and business set ups geared entirely towards men. Women also do a disproportionate amount of household chores and caregiving, which are not valued in traditional economics. South Asia has the dubious distinction of having the world’s most skewed gender wage gap. India is among the top 20 countries with the highest percentage gender wage gap.
Still not convinced? Let us take a quick look at Bollywood. Conventional success in Bollywood means obscene amounts of money. But the obscene amounts made by male stars exceed those by women stars. This is even as movies become more women-centric (think Queen and Mary Kom) as opposed to women playing only suffering and supporting roles as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. This disparity is in no way limited to Bollywood. Patricia Arquette, who won an Oscar for the best-supporting actress role, used the stage to make a plea for wage equality for both men and women in Hollywood. While her comments are not entirely clear of controversy and don’t account clearly for intersectionality of gender and race, they do put forth the reality of these industries.
When the Sony servers were hacked, there was a lot of outrage some of which was directed at the pay disparity between Jennifer Lawrence (and Amy Adams) and her male co-stars for the movie American Hustle. This is not unusual except for the fact it is one of the few times the difference is well-documented and available for people to see.
The Khan trio (Aamir, Salman and Shahrukh) as well as Akshay Kumar make 400 million rupees per film on average. Actresses such as Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif make one-tenth of that amount on average per film. Actresses have started to speak out about this disparity in amounts paid. Aditi Rao Hydari has addressed the issue: “I don’t really understand why we are paid less than the male actors because we put equal efforts and recent past has shown that actresses can deliver a hit film. We deserve better pay, equal to what actors get”. The gap has started to reduce as more women-centric films are made and are increasingly popular with audiences. But lists of richest Indian celebrities have lots of men but very few women. There is a long, long way to go to remove the wage gap in Bollywood. If this is the scenario in an industry that is so often in the public eye, think about what the situation is like in other industries. Accurate and exact statistics about wage gaps are hard to get because reporting salaries is often voluntary and data isn’t available for all sectors. But we do know for sure that women are typically paid less than men for the same work. This has to change.
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I think of myself as a feminist development practitioner with a strong interest in issues related to gender and education. I enjoy writing about my interests, a happy step forward from the angst laden poetry read more...
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My house-help asked excitedly, “I am going for wedding. Can you let me wear your red & black saree? To be honest I was stumped for a moment; I didn’t know what to say but I still said yes.
I lent a gorgeous saree to my house-help for a wedding in her family. Soon I stated getting questions if I would wear that saree again or if I was okay to be seen wearing the same saree my house-help was wearing?
We are all so conditioned to give our used clothes to our house-helps but are we okay to wear the clothes they were wearing?
A few days ago she came excitedly to me, “I am going for a family wedding. I want to wear your red & black saree, Ill wash and give it to you after the function. Please can you let me wear it?”
Beauty is a very clever, very evil capitalist tool. It traps those who have it into hanging on to it for dear life and those who don't into mutilating, torturing themselves to achieve the unachievable.
I recently wrote a piece about MP Shashi Tharoor’s tweet in which he had shared a pic with six women parliamentarians tagging them and saying “Who says the Lok Sabha isn’t an attractive place to work?”
There was a rash of comments on the post shared on Instagram, which ranged from “chill, it’s just a compliment” and “stop overthinking compliments”, to (worried) men lamenting about “these feminazi”.
Here’s my answer to all those comments.
We all know about the gender pay gap, but in today’s digital world, there’s another gap that is equally important: the digital gender gap.
This doesn’t just describe the lack of women in STEM or working in Silicon Valley. The term also refers to the difference in access that women and men have to the Internet. In India, only 29% of Internet users are female and the gender gap for mobile Internet users is 56%. Gender-based digital exclusion has many causes, from lack of education and technological literacy, to affordability and socio-cultural norms.
In certain rural areas, there is even legislation that actively works against digital inclusivity and equality. One village in Uttar Pradesh, for example, introduced a fine of up to Rs. 21,000 against girls using their mobile phones outside the home. The lawmakers, who claimed this would reduce crime against women, effectively limited the access women had to digital technology instead. This is just one of the more absurdly unnecessary barriers to internet access, but there are of course plenty more, not to mention the violent misogyny on the web that deters women from continuing to use the internet.
In the last few decades women across the world have stormed almost every profession with élan, but it has led to a double burden on women, especially in conventional societies like India where women’s work in homes and families is still almost invisible.
The traditional Indian concept of a household largely persists and presumes that certain jobs within the household are to be performed only by women – housekeeping, child and elderly care, cooking, cleaning are all considered to be a woman’s responsibility by default. In addition there is also the expectation of emotional labour required for holding families together, resolving every day conflicts and sustaining patriarchal status quo within families.
Oxfam which is an international confederation of 20 NGOs working with partners in over 90 countries to end the injustices that cause poverty, has recently asserted that – “inequality has a “female face” in India, where women are less likely to have paid work when compared to men.”