As a woman, who suffered through poverty, growing up in rural Mississippi, Oprah Winfrey, an African-American icon, rose to stardom and wealth after being noticed in a beauty pageant, leading her on the road to talk and TV shows.
But, reaching the status she has currently was not that easy. Winfrey recalls one experience she had in 1980. At this time, she was co-hosting a television show with Richard Sher. She recalls confronting her boss with this and stating that Richard Sher “was making more than I [she] did and we did the same job, and my boss said to me, 'Do you have children? '" Additionally, while still being a new addition to the talk show world, she raised the issue to her boss about the pay of the behind-the-scenes women on her show by telling him “Everybody needs
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With millions of women in the United States being swindled of their proper pays, her messages, spread with her whopping status, speaks for those who cannot be heard.
Another woman with a strong social standing in the U.S. and who stands for a solution to unequal pay is Jennifer Lawrence. Currently she is drawing major media attention for her recently-released essay, asking tough questions tied to gender pay gap, writing “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’s essay acts as an ‘aftershock’ of the Sony hack of December 2014, when it was noted that Lawrence had made significantly less than male co-stars in the 2013 box-office hit, American Hustle. Starring alongside Lawrence is Amy Adams, perhaps best known for her appearances in Julie & Julia and Enchanted. Both earned a 7% pay, 2% less than every other man lead (Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner) that made 9% off of the film’s box office