Robin Wright Recounts Her Fight for Equal Pay on Netflix’s House of Cards

It seems that not even being the co-lead on a popular show on which you are at times a more popular character with fans is enough to earn you equal pay to a man if you’re a woman. House of Cards‘ Robin Wright, who plays the intriguing Claire Underwood, recently spoke out about her fight for equal pay.

According to The Huffington Post, Wright spoke at an event for the Rockerfeller Foundation last night, and she talked about why she loves the show so much, as well as the story of how she went full Underwood and convinced Netflix to pay her more:

It was the perfect paradigm. There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch are equal. And they are in House of Cards.
I was looking at the statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on it. I was like, “You better pay me or I’m going to go public.” And they did.

And then…she went public anyway. Thing is, this stuff is important to talk about. It’s more difficult for injustice to exist in the light of day, so I’m grateful for all the women in Hollywood who’ve stepped forward to talk about how they’re treated.

Wright also talked about the time during which her career suffered a bit while she was raising her children, which highlights another way in which sexism plays into the gender wage gap:

Because I wasn’t working full time, I wasn’t building my salary bracket. If you don’t build that … with notoriety and presence, you’re not in the game anymore. You become a B-list actor. You’re not box office material. You don’t hold the value you would have held if you had done four movies a year like Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett did during the time I was raising my kids.

Here’s hoping that Hollywood — hell, here’s hoping the world — gets it together on gender real soon. If privileged, white actresses still have to deal with this, what hope is there for the rest of us?

(via New York Magazine)

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