Oscar Winner Calls Out Gender Inequality, Says She’d Be Earning “A Lot More” If She Were a Man

At the 2019 Oscars, Olivia Colman was everyone’s ‘favorite’ actress after walking away with the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Queen Anne in The Favourite, a historical comedy-drama where cousins Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and Abigail Hill all vie for Queen Anne’s approval.

But despite taking home an Oscar, she feels it would have happened a lot sooner had she been a male. In an interview with CNN, Colman called out pay disparities between male and female actors in the entertainment industry.

Colman Denies Research Claiming Male Actors ‘Draw In Audiences”

“Research suggests that (women) have always been big box office draws, but male actors get paid more because they used to say they draw in the audiences, and actually, that hasn’t been true for decades,” Colman said. “But they still like to use that as a reason to not pay women as much as their male counterparts.”

Despite her display case housing multiple Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs and an Academy Award, she still urges “that if I was Oliver Colman, I’d be earning …a lot more than I am.” She never mentioned any first-hand experience of discrimination, but Colman did point out one scenario where there was an alleged “12,000% difference.”

Colman used blockbusters like Barbie and Bridesmaids as examples of how women can carry the industry just as well as men. And the box office numbers speak for themselves. “People say men get paid more because they get more bums on seats,” she said. “That’s a lie! It can be proved in the box office. I don’t know why we’re still having to discuss it.”

She Isn’t the First and Won’t Be the Last

But Colman isn’t the first actress to kick up a stink over gender inequality. Fellow actress Jennifer Lawrence spoke out years prior in 2015. “It doesn’t matter how much I do,” Lawrence told Vogue. “I’m still not going to get paid as much as that guy, because of my vagina?”

Lawrence added, “In other situations, what I have seen — and I’m sure other women in the workforce have seen as well — is that it’s extremely uncomfortable to inquire about equal pay. And if you do question something that appears unequal, you’re told it’s not gender disparity but they can’t tell you what exactly it is.”

In Forbes’ rundown of 2023’s highest-paid actors, only two of the top 10 were women — those being Margot Robbie and Jennifer Aniston.