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Thursday, January 25, 2018
TV writers are sharing their salaries in a Google spreadsheet to combat pay disparity
The Verge: TV writers, producers, executives, and assistants have been anonymously
sharing their salaries in a widely circulated Google spreadsheet this
week as part of an effort to help people working in the entertainment
industry achieve pay parity, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
3 comments:
Evan Schild
said...
Whoever started this speared sheet is a genius. With a lot of problems arising from learning that some ones counterpart of someone of a lesser job is making more this spreadsheet will come in very handy. Just like at google I think this idea will work. When someone is getting a new job offer they can go look at this and see if the numbers are similar to what they were offered. While this does not help the situation that women and people of color are getting paid less hopefully this will get more networks to start paying equal. When reading this article, I did learn that show writers also do not make that much money. If there’s 20 episodes and getting 10,000 per episode that’s only 200,000. That is a lot of money but compared to Mark Wahlberg who made 5 million on one movie it is not a lot.
Salaries are usually something that is kept pretty private which is hard when it comes to making sure your pay is fair. This anonymous google doc is funny in a way because it is such a simple work around to make sure that there is not unfair salary discrepancies. I think one flaw is that there might not be enough information that is given to determine if the salary differences are because of the scale of show/specific responsibilities, or because of gender and race differences. With the CBS example given, sure there might be something else going on, but that is a pretty stark difference between people of different race and gender. I think making everyone aware that this gender pay gap exists is the first step and a very important one, but the second step of fixing it needs to come quickly if not immediately. I think we are moving in a positive direction, but too slowly.
The concept of this spreadsheet is not only incredibly important to drawing attention to a problem, but also a genius idea to make use of something that isn't usually thought of as a social justice platform. Google Sheets is something people use for tallying totals, yes, but not many people would think to use it's sharable capabilities to make a spreadsheet drawing attention to inequality of wages. Not only is it drawing attention to a problem in real time way that makes the facts and numbers and how they interact with things like race and gender more obvious, it's done in a way that makes it completely anonymous and safe for people who want to input their own wages and incomes to help further the cause without risking their own jobs and makes use of the crowdsource culture being made by social media to bring attention to a pervasive problem and spur on change.
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3 comments:
Whoever started this speared sheet is a genius. With a lot of problems arising from learning that some ones counterpart of someone of a lesser job is making more this spreadsheet will come in very handy. Just like at google I think this idea will work. When someone is getting a new job offer they can go look at this and see if the numbers are similar to what they were offered. While this does not help the situation that women and people of color are getting paid less hopefully this will get more networks to start paying equal. When reading this article, I did learn that show writers also do not make that much money. If there’s 20 episodes and getting 10,000 per episode that’s only 200,000. That is a lot of money but compared to Mark Wahlberg who made 5 million on one movie it is not a lot.
Salaries are usually something that is kept pretty private which is hard when it comes to making sure your pay is fair. This anonymous google doc is funny in a way because it is such a simple work around to make sure that there is not unfair salary discrepancies. I think one flaw is that there might not be enough information that is given to determine if the salary differences are because of the scale of show/specific responsibilities, or because of gender and race differences. With the CBS example given, sure there might be something else going on, but that is a pretty stark difference between people of different race and gender. I think making everyone aware that this gender pay gap exists is the first step and a very important one, but the second step of fixing it needs to come quickly if not immediately. I think we are moving in a positive direction, but too slowly.
The concept of this spreadsheet is not only incredibly important to drawing attention to a problem, but also a genius idea to make use of something that isn't usually thought of as a social justice platform. Google Sheets is something people use for tallying totals, yes, but not many people would think to use it's sharable capabilities to make a spreadsheet drawing attention to inequality of wages. Not only is it drawing attention to a problem in real time way that makes the facts and numbers and how they interact with things like race and gender more obvious, it's done in a way that makes it completely anonymous and safe for people who want to input their own wages and incomes to help further the cause without risking their own jobs and makes use of the crowdsource culture being made by social media to bring attention to a pervasive problem and spur on change.
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