Clooney’s Annual Income is More Than 10 Female Actors’ Combined

George Clooney is the world’s highest paid actor according to Forbes magazine.

When Forbes released its list of top 10 highest paid actors in the world, a side note caught our eye.

The note said: ‘top 10 actors earned some $784 million collectively, once again dwarfing the top 10 women who earned a cumulative $186 million in the same period’.

And that Human Rights Lawyer Amal Clooney’s husband, George Clooney’s annual income is 1.2 times the income of 10 top women actors combined!

Granted, this has been a great year for Clooney who thanks to the up to $1 billion purchase of his Casamigos Tequila, got a pretax paycheck of $239.

But the earnings of the world’s top actors only highlighted that the gender pay gap exists even among millionaires.

The top 10 male actors list included two Indian actors; Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar. The top 10 women actors’ list however, did not feature a single Indian woman.

In May this year, Hollywood actor Benedict Cumberbatch opened up about his policy on equal pay. In an interview to a Radio Times magazine, Cumberbatch said:

Look at your quotas, ask what women are being paid, and say if she’s not paid the same as the men, I’m not doing it. Equal pay and a place at the table are the central tenets of feminism. 

Robin Wright, the protagonist of the Netflix original House of Cards too called out the show makers in 2016 for not paying her as much as Kevin Spacey was getting. When asked again in 2017 whether her pay was corrected or not, she said:

I don’t think I’m getting paid the same amount. They told me I was getting a raise. But... I don’t think so. I really don’t like being duped. It’s such a male-dominant workforce still. There’s a conditioning. And changing the condition of men is what needs to happen.

Wright told Rhapsody

In India, the discussion of equal pay remains in ivory towers. The male actors are either too proud or too apolitical to harbour any opinions on unequal pay. Women actors such as Anushka Sharma, Priyanka Chopra, Kangana Ranaut have raised concerns about not being paid as much as their male counterparts. Despite the uproar, veteran actor Juhi Chawla in 2016 said:

Pay disparity has always been there. It was there during our times too. There was no problem. It wasn’t something I got upset about. We just accepted that the male actors would get more than us. But it is alright… And it is pretty much the same now.

Chawla’s statement was damaging for the work done by all the feminist around the world in the last 50 years.

If this year’s Forbes wealthiest actors’ list is blatantly unequal, we can only hope that the gap will be bridged at some point in future.