The internet erupted after Michelle Williams called out the gender pay gap in her Emmys acceptance speech. But shouldn’t it matter that she got her facts all wrong?
After accepting her award for best actress in a limited series or TV movie in Fosse/Verdon, Williams, commendably, took the opportunity to highlight what she saw as a problem:
“My bosses never presumed to know better than I did about what I needed in order to do my job and honor Gwen Verdon.” #FosseVerdonFX star Michelle Williams thanks her studios during her acceptance speech for lead actress in a limited series https://t.co/WmT1Fmyol4 #Emmys pic.twitter.com/DDF1ONJV7Z
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) September 23, 2019
It’s a beautiful speech. It’s just not quite accurate.
The pay gap does exist in the sense that not everyone is paid the same, a fact of which Williams is well aware. She was infamously paid much less than Mark Wahlberg for a reshoot of All the Money in the World (thanks Kevin Spacey). Williams knows the importance of getting an agent who will fight for you, but that doesn’t mean the national pay gap is as dire as it sounds.
In fact, nearly all of the pay gap, which is calculated by comparing the median salary of all full-time working men by the median salary of all full-time working women in America, can be explained by women’s choices in profession and weekly hours worked. (“Full time,” according to the Department of Labor, is anything upwards of 35 hours.)
Feminists like to blame sexism for the fact that women, on average, make 20 cents less per dollar than men. But a variety of factors, including industry and time off to care for children, combine to mean women aren’t paid as much as men for those reasons, not because of the patriarchy.
When all other factors are accounted for, the apparent sexism holding women back seems to mean they make just 2 cents less per dollar, and some of that may also be explained by men reporting that they work longer hours.
There may be a small pay discrepancy due to prejudice, sure. But it’s not the systemic or substantial problem that Williams and most feminists preach about.
For the tiny bit of the wage gap that remains when you calculate it correctly, Williams had good advice: Allow women to succeed because of their workplace environments, and not in spite of them. That’s an important message, which unfortunately got muddled by all the misplaced indignation.
