Jennifer Lawrence speaks out about wage gap

On Oct. 13, Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence revealed she was to blame for getting paid significantly less than her male co-stars.

“I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early,” Lawrence wrote in “Lenny,” a weekly feminist newsletter created by “Girls” star Lena Dunham.

Lawrence said she hesitated to negotiate aggressively because she didn’t want to seem difficult or demanding. She wanted to be liked, and she’s not the only woman with this problem. The PostScript’s September survey found that the wage gap is a top concern of Columbia College students.

When Harvard University surveyed nearly 300 men and women and asked respondents about the most recent negotiations they’d initiated and when they expected to negotiate again, they found similar results. The study showed that not only did men place themselves in negotiation situations more often than women, but that they see more of their interactions as potential negotiations.

Another Harvard Business School study tested gender difference in the lab. Subjects were told that they would be observed playing a word game and that they would be paid between $3 and $10 for playing. After each subject completed the task, an experimenter thanked the participant and said, “Here’s $3. Is $3 OK?” For the men, it was not OK, and they said so. Their requests for more money exceeded the women’s by nine to one.

“Are we socially conditioned to behave this way? Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t ‘offend’ or ‘scare’ men?” Lawrence wrote.

The researchers of the lab study, Linda Babcock, Sara Laschever, Michele Gelf and Deborah Small, wrote in Harvard Business Review that women are indeed cultured to behave this way:

“Women are less likely than men to negotiate for themselves for several reasons. First, they often are socialized from an early age not to promote their own interests and to focus instead on the needs of others. The messages girls receive—from parents, teachers, other children, the media, and society in general—can be so powerful that when they grow up they may not realize that they’ve internalized this behavior, or they may realize it but not understand how it affects their willingness to negotiate. Women tend to assume that they will be recognized and rewarded for working hard and doing a good job. Unlike men, they haven’t been taught that they can ask for more.”

The fight for equal pay gets even harder, depending on your race or ethnicity. American women working full-time earn 78 percent of what their male counterparts make.

Latina women earn about 54 cents for every dollar earned by white men, according to a 2015 analysis of federal wage data by the American Association of University Women, a non-profit organization that advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy and research.

The gap increases for other groups of women, too. American Indian women earn 59 cents for every dollar white men are paid. For Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, it’s 62 cents; and for black women, it’s 63 cents. Asian women earn median wages that come closest to the median wages of white men, earning 90 cents for every dollar. The gaps for each group of women are smaller when compared with men in their own racial and ethnic group, but that’s of little comfort when there is a gap in wages for men, too.

The fact that women earn less than men for the same work costs everyone, but especially families in which women are the breadwinners.

Lawrence’s outspokenness hasn’t solved the problem, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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