May 23, 2018 • 23 mins
Skeptics say the gender pay gap is explained by choices women make about family and career. Rebecca Greenfield unpacks those arguments with the help of professors from Harvard and Georgetown. Then, Jordyn Holman goes inside a contract negotiation between Netflix and the comedian and actress Mo’Nique that went south.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey Max, Hello Becca. So you and I went to
a bar in downtown Manhattan when it was still extremely
cold out, and we went to talk to people about
the gender pay gap. We wanted to hear what the
average person on the street has to say about this stuff.
One of the first guys we talked to works for
the state of New York. At first he told us
he believed in the pay gap, and even saw him
(00:23):
one of his previous workplaces. But then after talking to
him for a little while, he told us what he
really thought from what I could see in my current position,
if there's a gap, it's not twenty cents on the dollar.
But if that was in fact true, Yes, of course
that's not right. But it is true as far as
(00:43):
I know. That really is what the data shows. I think,
yes it is. So this guy knows women are paid less,
but the number he hears it it just doesn't sound
right him. He looks around, he sees things getting better
for women. He just doesn't buy that things could really
be so bad. I don't think it's a conspiracy um,
(01:07):
but yes, I think maybe maybe somewhat overmown, especially nowadays,
it's a lot of different than it was even ten
years ago. So while I recognize that probably is somewhere
of a gap, I think that gap is getting smaller.
I think there's more opportunities for women these days to
advance in their career. Then he said something that reminded
(01:27):
me of what I hear in my reporting all the time.
It's not that the pay up isn't real exactly, but
that I'm misunderstanding the data. Basically, the data doesn't show
what I say it does. You could look at data,
I could look at data, She could look at data,
and we could all come up with our own numbers.
(01:49):
I mean, it's not a black and white thing. There's
a very great area when you look at the world.
You know what the population like, where is our place like?
Where is our value? Will deserve people for equal work?
This woman, we almost put this gender bias and ourselves,
(02:12):
and nationwide the median salary for men is greater than
women in ninety nine point six percent of major occupations Women.
What do they want? We want to end gender inequality,
and to do this we need everyone involved. Well, actually
it's the feminist celebrities and politicians spreading this wage cap
(02:34):
myth who have the math problem. Ginger Rogers did everything
that Freda Stare did, She just did it backward did
in I welcome back to the Paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield.
This week we are going to investigate the gray areas
(02:55):
in the data. We've heard from listeners who feel like
the guy from the Bar, and we've also heard from
people who don't believe in the pay gap at all.
They say that figure the gap between what women and
men make in the US is misleading, that it's just
an average that doesn't control for people in the same
industries or doing the same job. This is a common
(03:16):
critique of pay gap reporting. Here's Britt Hume on Fox
News making that same case. Women make different choices about
what kinds of jobs they seek in reaction to marriage
and childbirth when those things have taken into consideration. Studies
have indicated that the pay gap all but evaporates. That phrase,
all but evaporates. I heard a lot that the pay
(03:37):
gap disappears when you control for things like the fields
women tend to work in and the time they take
off to care for their families. The pay gap does
get smaller when you control for certain things. But no
matter how much Matthew do, it never disappears when you
control for job title, company, and industry. One study found
that there's still a five point four percent pay gap
(03:59):
in the u US that's unexplained. We know pay discrimination
is still happening, and that's not right or fair. But
I also want to talk about another part of this
argument that women make choices to focus on family rather
than work and that's why we earn on average less
than men. Is that what's really happening. The research does
(04:20):
show that women start off at near parity with men
in their careers, but after having a kid the gap widens.
Is this because women are choosing parenting over working in
high paid jobs because that's what they value. I think
that it's a more complicated story than simply that women
value family more than careers. I think the whole workplace
(04:41):
is really set up so that it's harder for women
to be parents than it is for men. That's Robin Eale.
She's a business administration professor at Harvard, and she recently
co wrote an article with Kathy Tinsley, a management professor
at Georgetown, called What Most People Get Wrong About Men
and Women. When she talks about how the workplace is
(05:02):
set up better for men than women. She's partly talking
about the rigid nine to five work day and how
that makes it harder to say, pick up your kids
from school. It's challenging for anyone, regardless of gender, to
work a full time job and take care of kids,
but we expect women more than men to make it work.
And to make it work, women shift to jobs with
(05:23):
fewer demands, flexible schedules, or telecommuting options. The culture is
telling them that once you become a mother, to be
a good mother, you really need to take those accommodations,
whereas for men, it's saying, you know, you really shouldn't
take those accommodations because your role is as the breadwinner.
So men tend to wratch it up after they have kids,
and women will be more likely to wratch it back.
(05:45):
So the culture and the organization interpret what people should
be doing once they have children. This idea that we
expect women to do less at work when they have
a child and men to do more. It shows up
in the data. Women's earnings decrease four then for every
child she has. Men's earnings actually increase six percent when
they have kids. These are known as the motherhood penalty
(06:08):
and the fatherhood bonus. And even when men and women
both act the same at work, the stereotypes we have
about women can hurt their earnings. Here's Kathy Tinsley, Robin's
co author. So when somebody is absent from a meeting,
there's oftentimes uncertainties about why that is occurring. Right, you
(06:28):
don't have perfect information and corporations about what everybody is
doing all the time. And what happens is when you
have imperfect information, your brain doesn't really like that i
perfect information, and so it fills in that imperfect information
with assumptions, with educated guesses about what that missing information is.
And people use gender stereotypes as a way of helping
(06:49):
them fill in missing information. And So what can happen
in any meeting where a man may be absent, The
assumption is more likely to be, oh, he could be
at another client meeting, or he you know, had some
emergency come up that was also work related, right, Whereas
if if a woman is doing it, it would be
(07:10):
more likely to be a family related assumption. So, even
if women and men do the same things at work,
we imagine a woman's work is suffering because of her family,
whereas we don't assume the same thing about a man.
Then there's that other point that paygap skeptics make that
women make different choices about what kinds of jobs we seek.
(07:32):
As we've talked about on the show before, women do
tend to work in jobs that pay less, like teaching
and secretarial work. Last week we showed you that those
jobs pay less because women do them. But is working
in these jobs always a choice? Take technology, it's a
well paid and male dominated field. If women aren't rising
(07:53):
to the top or succeeding as coders and engineers, some
people say it's because they're just not interested in it
or not good at it, and that feeds into this
general idea that women don't have the aptitude for math, coding,
or other skills that happen to lead to high paying jobs.
We're just choosing jobs, lower paying jobs that we just
happened to be suited for. Well, there's a couple of
(08:15):
things that are going on there. The first is our
women as good at math as men, and the answer
there is yes. Um Shelby Hide has been doing research
for decades, and all of her research shows that the
gap between men and women in math ability is small
to negligible. You could call it trivial. Then the question becomes, well,
(08:39):
if there aren't any inherent differences between men and women
and math ability, then why is it that women aren't
entering some fields and men are entering them. One theory
that Robin brings up is that those fields they aren't
hospitable to women. That's where you have to look into
the context. What is it that men and women experire
(09:00):
riants in the workplace and are they given the same
opportunity to thrive? That question, are women given the same
opportunity as men to thrive? We know that women and
men do have different experiences at work, like women experience
much higher rates of workplace harassment, and that actually pushes
them out of the highest paying jobs in fields. Research
(09:22):
has found that when women get harassed, they go to
safer jobs, and the more female dominated jobs have much
fewer reports of workplace harassment, and those jobs they pay less.
But there are more subtle ways our experiences are different too.
There are all kinds of messages that tell women they
don't belong in the higher tiers of a company. Does
(09:43):
it mean the same thing to strive for a particular job?
Is it harder on women to perform in a job
where they have power over other people, probably because the
stereotype is that women aren't supposed to want to have power,
They aren't supposed to want to be ambitious and so
m So it's just it's just harder to live in
those jobs. When we talk about the gender pay gap,
(10:06):
we're not talking about people in power, mostly men, conspiring
to pay women less. There's no grand conspiracy, just a
bunch of systems that don't work well for professional women
because they were never designed to. As hard as the
(10:27):
aggregate number is to understand, even when we hear stories
from individual women that are telling us exactly how much
less they're making, we don't always see it as a
part of the pay gap. Our next story is about
a time a woman pointed out something that seemed unfair
and the world came back at her with a million
reasons why she can't be mad about it. Earlier this year,
(10:48):
comedian and actress Monique went public about a salary negotiation
with Netflix that went south. She said she was offered
way less to do a comedy special than what famous
men and white women had been paid it. She asked
her fans to do something kind of major boycott Netflix.
Her story went viral, but not in a good way.
(11:09):
People didn't rally behind Monique like they rallied behind other
women in Hollywood. They told her she didn't deserve more money.
I say, what kind of reactions was I expecting. I don't.
I wasn't expecting the reaction of, oh, we'll just do
it because Monique said it. I was expecting for us
(11:33):
to research what it is that I'm saying. Jordan Holman
spoke to Monique about her experience. In January, Monique posted
a video on Instagram. This was not a typical Monique post.
Her feed is mostly clips of her working out and dancing,
or promoting the podcast she does with her husband, Sydney.
(11:53):
Most of the time, she starts her videos with hey
my Babies. On that Sunday, she went script, hey my
loves I Am asking that she stand with me and
boycott Nextflix for gender bias and color bias. It was
all for a five d dollars deal last week to
do a comedy special. However, Amy she was afread eleven
(12:14):
million dollars, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle twenty million dollars.
A popular fan revolt from Netflix didn't happen. The general
reaction was not pro Monique. In blog posts and tweets,
comedy fans were skeptical about the comedians called to action.
Words like delusional, loudmouth, and ignorant were being thrown around.
(12:35):
A few people defended Monique, but most said she was
basically stepping outside of her lane. Here's Tony Rock, Chris
Rock's brother talking to TMZ. She's calling it color bias
and gender bias. In her words, not believe the stage
and how long people. She's been sta A long long time,
(12:56):
And I thought it was expressly interesting that people were
reacting like this is to Monique. At the start of
this year, which was also at the height of the
Me too movement, the public was learning that other big
name actresses like Michelle Williams and Claire Foy from the
Netflix series The Crown were paid less than their male
co stars, But the audience response to those Hollywood pay
(13:18):
gapps was very different. People got really mad about it.
Claire Foy even ended up getting back pay. I talked
to Monique about all of this in March. Hello, Hi,
this is Jordan's Hey Joean, Now you're doing baby, It's
Monique good. How are you today. I'm wonderful. I'm so glad,
I asked her if she was surprised that people seemed
(13:39):
to respond differently to her pay gap then those other actresses.
It didn't surprise me because of what the package looks
like in Monique, it's a problem. And those sports that
you named their white women correct. Yes, right. So when
our wife to say listen, this is not right, we listen,
(14:01):
and we should and we should. Now, if I'm a
fat black woman, well people are really looking at me
like have you lost your mind? You should just be
grateful they let you in because you've got three strikes
going against you. You're a woman, you black, and you fat,
(14:21):
and you want to take a stand girl. Monique is
one of the most famous black female comedians in America,
but even before this Instagram post, she has always been
the type of celebrity that you either love or hate.
She has a huge personality in her comedy. Isn't for everyone.
(14:42):
Black women. Don't give a we don't give a we
don't give a about, we don't give a way, don't
give a fun. Girl, You're gonna work them all, girl,
that y'all. In the early two thousand's she was everywhere.
(15:06):
She had the Monique Show, she wrote books, she appeared
on sitcoms. But what I know her from is The Parkers,
her number one hit sitcom on the UPN network about
a single mother and her dizzy daughter. If you were
a black girl like me, it was Appointment TV. Monique
(15:27):
moved to l A to pursue acting. When she was thirty,
she got the offer to start on her own show,
The Parkers. After only ninety days in Hollywood, when they
told her how much she'd be making, she felt like
a kid in the candy shop. So I was a
little girl. I didn't know the eggs questions. I didn't
know to say what's rating because no one told it
(15:49):
to me. So when they told me I would be
making a week, what you mean every you mean every week?
I would I would give this. Well, that's more money,
Jordan than my parents made. Monique star kept rising, and
in two thousand nine she landed something very rare for
(16:11):
a black woman, an Oscar nomination, not for her comedy,
but for her role in the serious drama Pruscious. And
that's when something happened that earned her reputation as a troublemaker.
In Hollywood. See, winning an Oscar involves its own separate
kind of side job. You don't just sit back and
(16:32):
let the Academy honor you. You have to do something
called an Oscar campaign. It involves going on junkets, doing
interviews and pressed lunches, and sometimes being on the road
for months. Monique she refused to do all of that.
She says she was busy with her family. She was
raising two young twins during the Oscar season for Pruscious.
(16:54):
She wanted to stay home with them and watched Curious George.
She says, the directors and producers didn't care. Everything was
simply about the business. We hear all of that, but
we need you here, and I understand that because at
the time it was coming from three people that have
no families. Monique won the Oscar anyway, making her one
of only eight black women to ever when an acting
(17:17):
Oscar first. I would like to thank the Academy for
showing that it can be about the performance and not
the politics. But looking back, Monique says that even though
she won the Oscar, refusing to do that Oscar campaign
(17:37):
that hurt her career. I got labeled as difficult and
demanding It's hard to know how much that difficult and
demanding label hurt her, but after Pressures, the jobs definitely
slowed down. She's only done two stand up specials in
the past decade. She's been in a handful of movies
since Pressures, but none of them have been nearly as big.
(18:01):
So that brings us to the beginning of when she
gets this offer from Netflix. Even though she hadn't had
a big hit in a while, the amount they were offering,
five hundred thousand dollars, sounded really low to her compared
to the tens of millions she knew other comedians were offered.
She says that her team, which includes her attorney, Ricky Anderson,
(18:24):
and her husband's Sidney Hicks, who is also her manager,
had to fight to even get Netflix VP Robbie Prawe
on the phone to talk about the offer. Netflix declined
to speak on this podcast, saying that they do not
comment on contract negotiations, but the conversation Monique describes once
they eventually did have a conference call with the studio
(18:47):
shows you just how difficult it can be to prove
your value as an entertainer. Monique and her team felt
like they could make a case that she was worth
more by any standard Robbie Praue could come up with,
but whenever they made their case, he would just change
the standard. Monique's people said she was worth more than
(19:08):
five hundred thousand dollars because of things like her oscar.
Robbie Prau said, that was Monique's resume, and they didn't
look at resumes. They asked why Amy Schumer Steel was
so much bigger, and he said, well, she sold out
Madison Square Garden twice and she had a big hit
over the summer. So Sidney said, is that not Amy
(19:30):
Schuma's resume? And you know how quiet it is right now?
Jordan's yes, that's how quiet it was. On the phone.
We talked about the gender pay gap a lot, but
if you're a black woman, you also face a racial
pay gap. It's really tricky to know which one affects
you more. We know women make eighty cents to the
(19:53):
dollar on average, but if you're a black woman, you
get sixty three cents to a white man's dollar and
ninety three cents compared to black men. Here is Monique
being told that the market value for her entertainment was
less way less than a white woman or a black man.
Was it her qualifications, her race, her gender. It's impossible
(20:17):
to every say for sure. And that's what's so crazy
for anyone who's ever been in a negotiation like this.
If you're one of those people who knows Monique as
a comedian and you're just not into her jokes, you
might think she's ridiculous for comparing herself to Amy Schumer
or Dave Chappelle. But a few people had her back.
(20:40):
But then you have those other people saying you better
not sit down, you better keep standing, you better keep
speaking up and speaking out. After all, she says, Schumer
and Chappelle were offered twenty two times more and forty
times more respectively than she was for a similar job.
Or are they worth that much more than her? Comedian
(21:03):
Wanda Sykes thankful Nique for sharing what Netflix seemed to
be offering black women compared to men in white women.
Wanda Sykes, she said Netflix offered her two hundred and
fifty dollars for her own comedy special, and when I
called for that boycott, there have been people that have
said calling for a boycott was extreme, and I want
(21:28):
to be the first to tell people calling for a
boycott is extreme. It was extremely extreme. However, isn't inequality extreme?
Injustice is extreme. Some people might hear Monique story and
(21:49):
say hers was obviously not a case of discrimination. She
had barely worked in comedy since the Parker's and some
just don't find her appealing, but take the reason since
why she hasn't worked and why she's not always appealing,
Her gender, her race, and even her size are all
part of it. That's how a lot of the gender
(22:10):
pay gap plays out. Women make less than men for
what seemed like innocent reasons, but when you dig deeper,
the real reasons have everything to do with the fact
that they're women. Next week, on the Paycheck, we'll go
to a country that thinks it knows how to fix
the pay gap, how by forcing big business to come clean.
(22:34):
Thanks for listening to The Paychecks. If you like the show,
head on over to Apple Podcasts and rate, review and subscribe.
We appreciate all feedback, even those one star reviews from
people who don't believe in the pay gap. This episode
of The Paycheck was reported by Jordan Holman, Max Abelson
and hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was
edited by Francesca Levi and produced by Liz Smith. We
(22:58):
also had helped from Magnus Henrickson, Gillian Goodman, and Janet Paskin.
Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderriott did
the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck branchesca Levy is Bloomberg's
head of podcasts
Hey Max, Hello Becca. So you and I went to
a bar in downtown Manhattan when it was still extremely
cold out, and we went to talk to people about
the gender pay gap. We wanted to hear what the
average person on the street has to say about this stuff.
One of the first guys we talked to works for
the state of New York. At first he told us
he believed in the pay gap, and even saw him
(00:23):
one of his previous workplaces. But then after talking to
him for a little while, he told us what he
really thought from what I could see in my current position,
if there's a gap, it's not twenty cents on the dollar.
But if that was in fact true, Yes, of course
that's not right. But it is true as far as
(00:43):
I know. That really is what the data shows. I think,
yes it is. So this guy knows women are paid less,
but the number he hears it it just doesn't sound
right him. He looks around, he sees things getting better
for women. He just doesn't buy that things could really
be so bad. I don't think it's a conspiracy um,
(01:07):
but yes, I think maybe maybe somewhat overmown, especially nowadays,
it's a lot of different than it was even ten
years ago. So while I recognize that probably is somewhere
of a gap, I think that gap is getting smaller.
I think there's more opportunities for women these days to
advance in their career. Then he said something that reminded
(01:27):
me of what I hear in my reporting all the time.
It's not that the pay up isn't real exactly, but
that I'm misunderstanding the data. Basically, the data doesn't show
what I say it does. You could look at data,
I could look at data, She could look at data,
and we could all come up with our own numbers.
(01:49):
I mean, it's not a black and white thing. There's
a very great area when you look at the world.
You know what the population like, where is our place like?
Where is our value? Will deserve people for equal work?
This woman, we almost put this gender bias and ourselves,
(02:12):
and nationwide the median salary for men is greater than
women in ninety nine point six percent of major occupations Women.
What do they want? We want to end gender inequality,
and to do this we need everyone involved. Well, actually
it's the feminist celebrities and politicians spreading this wage cap
(02:34):
myth who have the math problem. Ginger Rogers did everything
that Freda Stare did, She just did it backward did
in I welcome back to the Paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield.
This week we are going to investigate the gray areas
(02:55):
in the data. We've heard from listeners who feel like
the guy from the Bar, and we've also heard from
people who don't believe in the pay gap at all.
They say that figure the gap between what women and
men make in the US is misleading, that it's just
an average that doesn't control for people in the same
industries or doing the same job. This is a common
(03:16):
critique of pay gap reporting. Here's Britt Hume on Fox
News making that same case. Women make different choices about
what kinds of jobs they seek in reaction to marriage
and childbirth when those things have taken into consideration. Studies
have indicated that the pay gap all but evaporates. That phrase,
all but evaporates. I heard a lot that the pay
(03:37):
gap disappears when you control for things like the fields
women tend to work in and the time they take
off to care for their families. The pay gap does
get smaller when you control for certain things. But no
matter how much Matthew do, it never disappears when you
control for job title, company, and industry. One study found
that there's still a five point four percent pay gap
(03:59):
in the u US that's unexplained. We know pay discrimination
is still happening, and that's not right or fair. But
I also want to talk about another part of this
argument that women make choices to focus on family rather
than work and that's why we earn on average less
than men. Is that what's really happening. The research does
(04:20):
show that women start off at near parity with men
in their careers, but after having a kid the gap widens.
Is this because women are choosing parenting over working in
high paid jobs because that's what they value. I think
that it's a more complicated story than simply that women
value family more than careers. I think the whole workplace
(04:41):
is really set up so that it's harder for women
to be parents than it is for men. That's Robin Eale.
She's a business administration professor at Harvard, and she recently
co wrote an article with Kathy Tinsley, a management professor
at Georgetown, called What Most People Get Wrong About Men
and Women. When she talks about how the workplace is
(05:02):
set up better for men than women. She's partly talking
about the rigid nine to five work day and how
that makes it harder to say, pick up your kids
from school. It's challenging for anyone, regardless of gender, to
work a full time job and take care of kids,
but we expect women more than men to make it work.
And to make it work, women shift to jobs with
(05:23):
fewer demands, flexible schedules, or telecommuting options. The culture is
telling them that once you become a mother, to be
a good mother, you really need to take those accommodations,
whereas for men, it's saying, you know, you really shouldn't
take those accommodations because your role is as the breadwinner.
So men tend to wratch it up after they have kids,
and women will be more likely to wratch it back.
(05:45):
So the culture and the organization interpret what people should
be doing once they have children. This idea that we
expect women to do less at work when they have
a child and men to do more. It shows up
in the data. Women's earnings decrease four then for every
child she has. Men's earnings actually increase six percent when
they have kids. These are known as the motherhood penalty
(06:08):
and the fatherhood bonus. And even when men and women
both act the same at work, the stereotypes we have
about women can hurt their earnings. Here's Kathy Tinsley, Robin's
co author. So when somebody is absent from a meeting,
there's oftentimes uncertainties about why that is occurring. Right, you
(06:28):
don't have perfect information and corporations about what everybody is
doing all the time. And what happens is when you
have imperfect information, your brain doesn't really like that i
perfect information, and so it fills in that imperfect information
with assumptions, with educated guesses about what that missing information is.
And people use gender stereotypes as a way of helping
(06:49):
them fill in missing information. And So what can happen
in any meeting where a man may be absent, The
assumption is more likely to be, oh, he could be
at another client meeting, or he you know, had some
emergency come up that was also work related, right, Whereas
if if a woman is doing it, it would be
(07:10):
more likely to be a family related assumption. So, even
if women and men do the same things at work,
we imagine a woman's work is suffering because of her family,
whereas we don't assume the same thing about a man.
Then there's that other point that paygap skeptics make that
women make different choices about what kinds of jobs we seek.
(07:32):
As we've talked about on the show before, women do
tend to work in jobs that pay less, like teaching
and secretarial work. Last week we showed you that those
jobs pay less because women do them. But is working
in these jobs always a choice? Take technology, it's a
well paid and male dominated field. If women aren't rising
(07:53):
to the top or succeeding as coders and engineers, some
people say it's because they're just not interested in it
or not good at it, and that feeds into this
general idea that women don't have the aptitude for math, coding,
or other skills that happen to lead to high paying jobs.
We're just choosing jobs, lower paying jobs that we just
happened to be suited for. Well, there's a couple of
(08:15):
things that are going on there. The first is our
women as good at math as men, and the answer
there is yes. Um Shelby Hide has been doing research
for decades, and all of her research shows that the
gap between men and women in math ability is small
to negligible. You could call it trivial. Then the question becomes, well,
(08:39):
if there aren't any inherent differences between men and women
and math ability, then why is it that women aren't
entering some fields and men are entering them. One theory
that Robin brings up is that those fields they aren't
hospitable to women. That's where you have to look into
the context. What is it that men and women experire
(09:00):
riants in the workplace and are they given the same
opportunity to thrive? That question, are women given the same
opportunity as men to thrive? We know that women and
men do have different experiences at work, like women experience
much higher rates of workplace harassment, and that actually pushes
them out of the highest paying jobs in fields. Research
(09:22):
has found that when women get harassed, they go to
safer jobs, and the more female dominated jobs have much
fewer reports of workplace harassment, and those jobs they pay less.
But there are more subtle ways our experiences are different too.
There are all kinds of messages that tell women they
don't belong in the higher tiers of a company. Does
(09:43):
it mean the same thing to strive for a particular job?
Is it harder on women to perform in a job
where they have power over other people, probably because the
stereotype is that women aren't supposed to want to have power,
They aren't supposed to want to be ambitious and so
m So it's just it's just harder to live in
those jobs. When we talk about the gender pay gap,
(10:06):
we're not talking about people in power, mostly men, conspiring
to pay women less. There's no grand conspiracy, just a
bunch of systems that don't work well for professional women
because they were never designed to. As hard as the
(10:27):
aggregate number is to understand, even when we hear stories
from individual women that are telling us exactly how much
less they're making, we don't always see it as a
part of the pay gap. Our next story is about
a time a woman pointed out something that seemed unfair
and the world came back at her with a million
reasons why she can't be mad about it. Earlier this year,
(10:48):
comedian and actress Monique went public about a salary negotiation
with Netflix that went south. She said she was offered
way less to do a comedy special than what famous
men and white women had been paid it. She asked
her fans to do something kind of major boycott Netflix.
Her story went viral, but not in a good way.
(11:09):
People didn't rally behind Monique like they rallied behind other
women in Hollywood. They told her she didn't deserve more money.
I say, what kind of reactions was I expecting. I don't.
I wasn't expecting the reaction of, oh, we'll just do
it because Monique said it. I was expecting for us
(11:33):
to research what it is that I'm saying. Jordan Holman
spoke to Monique about her experience. In January, Monique posted
a video on Instagram. This was not a typical Monique post.
Her feed is mostly clips of her working out and dancing,
or promoting the podcast she does with her husband, Sydney.
(11:53):
Most of the time, she starts her videos with hey
my Babies. On that Sunday, she went script, hey my
loves I Am asking that she stand with me and
boycott Nextflix for gender bias and color bias. It was
all for a five d dollars deal last week to
do a comedy special. However, Amy she was afread eleven
(12:14):
million dollars, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle twenty million dollars.
A popular fan revolt from Netflix didn't happen. The general
reaction was not pro Monique. In blog posts and tweets,
comedy fans were skeptical about the comedians called to action.
Words like delusional, loudmouth, and ignorant were being thrown around.
(12:35):
A few people defended Monique, but most said she was
basically stepping outside of her lane. Here's Tony Rock, Chris
Rock's brother talking to TMZ. She's calling it color bias
and gender bias. In her words, not believe the stage
and how long people. She's been sta A long long time,
(12:56):
And I thought it was expressly interesting that people were
reacting like this is to Monique. At the start of
this year, which was also at the height of the
Me too movement, the public was learning that other big
name actresses like Michelle Williams and Claire Foy from the
Netflix series The Crown were paid less than their male
co stars, But the audience response to those Hollywood pay
(13:18):
gapps was very different. People got really mad about it.
Claire Foy even ended up getting back pay. I talked
to Monique about all of this in March. Hello, Hi,
this is Jordan's Hey Joean, Now you're doing baby, It's
Monique good. How are you today. I'm wonderful. I'm so glad,
I asked her if she was surprised that people seemed
(13:39):
to respond differently to her pay gap then those other actresses.
It didn't surprise me because of what the package looks
like in Monique, it's a problem. And those sports that
you named their white women correct. Yes, right. So when
our wife to say listen, this is not right, we listen,
(14:01):
and we should and we should. Now, if I'm a
fat black woman, well people are really looking at me
like have you lost your mind? You should just be
grateful they let you in because you've got three strikes
going against you. You're a woman, you black, and you fat,
(14:21):
and you want to take a stand girl. Monique is
one of the most famous black female comedians in America,
but even before this Instagram post, she has always been
the type of celebrity that you either love or hate.
She has a huge personality in her comedy. Isn't for everyone.
(14:42):
Black women. Don't give a we don't give a we
don't give a about, we don't give a way, don't
give a fun. Girl, You're gonna work them all, girl,
that y'all. In the early two thousand's she was everywhere.
(15:06):
She had the Monique Show, she wrote books, she appeared
on sitcoms. But what I know her from is The Parkers,
her number one hit sitcom on the UPN network about
a single mother and her dizzy daughter. If you were
a black girl like me, it was Appointment TV. Monique
(15:27):
moved to l A to pursue acting. When she was thirty,
she got the offer to start on her own show,
The Parkers. After only ninety days in Hollywood, when they
told her how much she'd be making, she felt like
a kid in the candy shop. So I was a
little girl. I didn't know the eggs questions. I didn't
know to say what's rating because no one told it
(15:49):
to me. So when they told me I would be
making a week, what you mean every you mean every week?
I would I would give this. Well, that's more money,
Jordan than my parents made. Monique star kept rising, and
in two thousand nine she landed something very rare for
(16:11):
a black woman, an Oscar nomination, not for her comedy,
but for her role in the serious drama Pruscious. And
that's when something happened that earned her reputation as a troublemaker.
In Hollywood. See, winning an Oscar involves its own separate
kind of side job. You don't just sit back and
(16:32):
let the Academy honor you. You have to do something
called an Oscar campaign. It involves going on junkets, doing
interviews and pressed lunches, and sometimes being on the road
for months. Monique she refused to do all of that.
She says she was busy with her family. She was
raising two young twins during the Oscar season for Pruscious.
(16:54):
She wanted to stay home with them and watched Curious George.
She says, the directors and producers didn't care. Everything was
simply about the business. We hear all of that, but
we need you here, and I understand that because at
the time it was coming from three people that have
no families. Monique won the Oscar anyway, making her one
of only eight black women to ever when an acting
(17:17):
Oscar first. I would like to thank the Academy for
showing that it can be about the performance and not
the politics. But looking back, Monique says that even though
she won the Oscar, refusing to do that Oscar campaign
(17:37):
that hurt her career. I got labeled as difficult and
demanding It's hard to know how much that difficult and
demanding label hurt her, but after Pressures, the jobs definitely
slowed down. She's only done two stand up specials in
the past decade. She's been in a handful of movies
since Pressures, but none of them have been nearly as big.
(18:01):
So that brings us to the beginning of when she
gets this offer from Netflix. Even though she hadn't had
a big hit in a while, the amount they were offering,
five hundred thousand dollars, sounded really low to her compared
to the tens of millions she knew other comedians were offered.
She says that her team, which includes her attorney, Ricky Anderson,
(18:24):
and her husband's Sidney Hicks, who is also her manager,
had to fight to even get Netflix VP Robbie Prawe
on the phone to talk about the offer. Netflix declined
to speak on this podcast, saying that they do not
comment on contract negotiations, but the conversation Monique describes once
they eventually did have a conference call with the studio
(18:47):
shows you just how difficult it can be to prove
your value as an entertainer. Monique and her team felt
like they could make a case that she was worth
more by any standard Robbie Praue could come up with,
but whenever they made their case, he would just change
the standard. Monique's people said she was worth more than
(19:08):
five hundred thousand dollars because of things like her oscar.
Robbie Prau said, that was Monique's resume, and they didn't
look at resumes. They asked why Amy Schumer Steel was
so much bigger, and he said, well, she sold out
Madison Square Garden twice and she had a big hit
over the summer. So Sidney said, is that not Amy
(19:30):
Schuma's resume? And you know how quiet it is right now?
Jordan's yes, that's how quiet it was. On the phone.
We talked about the gender pay gap a lot, but
if you're a black woman, you also face a racial
pay gap. It's really tricky to know which one affects
you more. We know women make eighty cents to the
(19:53):
dollar on average, but if you're a black woman, you
get sixty three cents to a white man's dollar and
ninety three cents compared to black men. Here is Monique
being told that the market value for her entertainment was
less way less than a white woman or a black man.
Was it her qualifications, her race, her gender. It's impossible
(20:17):
to every say for sure. And that's what's so crazy
for anyone who's ever been in a negotiation like this.
If you're one of those people who knows Monique as
a comedian and you're just not into her jokes, you
might think she's ridiculous for comparing herself to Amy Schumer
or Dave Chappelle. But a few people had her back.
(20:40):
But then you have those other people saying you better
not sit down, you better keep standing, you better keep
speaking up and speaking out. After all, she says, Schumer
and Chappelle were offered twenty two times more and forty
times more respectively than she was for a similar job.
Or are they worth that much more than her? Comedian
(21:03):
Wanda Sykes thankful Nique for sharing what Netflix seemed to
be offering black women compared to men in white women.
Wanda Sykes, she said Netflix offered her two hundred and
fifty dollars for her own comedy special, and when I
called for that boycott, there have been people that have
said calling for a boycott was extreme, and I want
(21:28):
to be the first to tell people calling for a
boycott is extreme. It was extremely extreme. However, isn't inequality extreme?
Injustice is extreme. Some people might hear Monique story and
(21:49):
say hers was obviously not a case of discrimination. She
had barely worked in comedy since the Parker's and some
just don't find her appealing, but take the reason since
why she hasn't worked and why she's not always appealing,
Her gender, her race, and even her size are all
part of it. That's how a lot of the gender
(22:10):
pay gap plays out. Women make less than men for
what seemed like innocent reasons, but when you dig deeper,
the real reasons have everything to do with the fact
that they're women. Next week, on the Paycheck, we'll go
to a country that thinks it knows how to fix
the pay gap, how by forcing big business to come clean.
(22:34):
Thanks for listening to The Paychecks. If you like the show,
head on over to Apple Podcasts and rate, review and subscribe.
We appreciate all feedback, even those one star reviews from
people who don't believe in the pay gap. This episode
of The Paycheck was reported by Jordan Holman, Max Abelson
and hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was
edited by Francesca Levi and produced by Liz Smith. We
(22:58):
also had helped from Magnus Henrickson, Gillian Goodman, and Janet Paskin.
Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderriott did
the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck branchesca Levy is Bloomberg's
head of podcasts
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