How gender pay gap is a global phenomenon, confirms Sharon Stone

Gender pay gap in the entertainment industry is not just a Bollywood phenomenon, it’s a global problem. And why just entertainment industry, it is across all industries, women are paid lesser than men. In conversation with the Basic Instinct actor Sharon Stone where she said she “would like to have directed” after her breakthrough role in Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller Basic Instinct in 1992, but wasn’t allowed to do so due to her gender. At the Red Sea International Film Festival, Sharon Stone said, “I went to the studio and asked them for a small budget,” said Stone. “And I was laughed out of the room; I was told ‘women don’t direct’.”

Basic Instincts completed thirty years early this year. Sharon Stone in a conversation  at the second edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival  said the difference between her Basic Instinct salary and that of co-star Michael Douglas meant she was not able to feel secure after the film made her famous. “I made $500,000, and Michael Douglas made $14m,” said Stone. “Michael could afford the car, driver, bodyguard. I had to move because people were on my roof and breaking my door down. I couldn’t afford the things I needed because of the sudden fame I had.”

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Stone took her concerns to the studio, saying “’it’s time for you to pay a woman more than $1m’ – which had never happened before. It was a big moment not just for me, but for the film industry.”

Sharon Stone mentioned that to break down these barriers, for women to be powerful in film, for women to be paid, to have equal rights – it was very conflicting to the masculine industry. “There was this backlash that I must be like my character – I must be killing people and naked and showing my vagina in the supermarket. It became personally traumatic in my life; I lost custody of my baby in my divorce, because the judge decided I was making sex movies.”

“I was greatly punished – it destroyed my personal life, my personal rights. It destroyed the way people thought about me as a human being – people went around saying ‘she’s like that character, because she couldn’t play that if she wasn’t that.’ I wasn’t acknowledged for the quality of my work until 20 years later.”

Recalling the Cannes debut of the film in 1992, Stone said she hid in the back of a car driving along the Croisette while a friend in the seat in front pretended to be her. “We were so afraid, I didn’t know what was happening,” said Stone, who added that when she went back to her hotel after the premiere, all of her possessions had been stolen – “my contact lenses, my camera, my film, my underwear”.

Bollywood film director and writer Tanuja Chandra, I remember once mentioned that when she first started out in the Indian entertainment business, the number of women directing and producing films was very low. However, even if the numbers are low, there is no viable reason for wages to differ based only on gender. There is still some justification for it if track records or profits accrued are different because this comes from existing business models which are often susceptible to flaws.

Chandra mentioned that even now, female-led films are sold at a lower price to distributors because of the prevalent belief in the trade that they cannot earn huge money. I understand that not many such films may have been blockbusters yet, but then, not many have been made, and it cannot be presumed that this is always going to be the case. Because of this, the budgets of female protagonist films are usually low too which impacts the making and quality of the film, further resulting in low enthusiasm to make such films.

I feel sometimes women are to be blamed because they settle for much less than they deserve. We feel that we are kind of indebted to someone because he believes in our capabilities. The biggest problem is that women are ashamed of negotiating for reasons that hold them back.

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