Big Night at the Oscars for Equal Pay for (Some) Women

Written by Katie Hegarty, Online Outreach Assistant, and cross-posted from NWLC’s blog.

The Academy Awards are, in one word, big. Big awards, big celebrities, big blockbusters, big hair…and in recent years, a big social media presence. Last year, a selfie tweeted by host Ellen DeGeneres “broke Twitter.” This year, that honor went to a surprising but overdue recipient: the call for equal pay.

The awards night thank you speech is a moment that, let’s be honest, sends a lot of us channel-surfing. But Patricia Arquette used that moment to tell millions of people about the critical need for fair pay. “It’s our time,” she said, “to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”

I couldn’t agree more with that sentence! Despite the signings of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, women overall in this country still typically face a 22 percent wage gap compared to men. Women are good at math — we know that 78¢ ≠ $1. And that’s just the math for women overall. Black women are paid 64¢ for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man, and for Latinas, that number is only 56¢. Arquette’s statement was powerful because it forced our best and brightest to turn over the spotlight to inequality.

However, let’s not throw her a ticker-tape equality parade quite yet. Arquette’s unfortunate erasing of different realities began in her original acceptance speech. She called for equality for “every woman who gave birth, every taxpayer and citizen of this nation.” Already, before she’s even mentioned pay equity, Arquette has made some damning implications. Do only women who have — or can — given birth deserve equal pay? That rules out an incredible number of women facing infertility, who have had hysterectomies, or who don’t want to have children. It rules out trans women who may or may not have reproductive organs that sustain pregnancy. The invocation of citizenship is also unstable ground — equality is not like a passport, something you must qualify for. Women deserve equality because of their humanity, not their nationality, and it’s pretty awful to bar a woman from justice just because she wasn’t born in the United States.

Things didn’t improve in the press room, as Arquette doubled down on her exclusionary language. She continued to sound the trumpet for equal pay, which is impressive and important considering she had a brand new Oscar to talk about! But her remarks created distinct categories that separated the identities of a lot of women. “It’s time for all the women in America,” she said, “and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”

That’s a lot to unpack. Parsing out sexual orientation and race from gender is both unhelpful and, frankly, impossible. There are a lot of women who are not straight and not white, but Arquette’s words create distinct boxes that can’t accommodate a gay Asian woman, or a bisexual Native American woman. The statement also uses a pretty hefty brush to gloss over the fact that women have not always fought for other groups’ rights — have you heard of the “lavender menace,” as Betty Freidan called lesbian women fighting for their rights?

But even if Arquette were right, even if women had been at the forefront of every march and every rally, the fact is that everyone else’s rights aren’t taken care of. It is absolutely time for women to get the equal pay and other justices we deserve. But it is not our turn. This is not about turns. The work of achieving equality has no right of way, no stoplights, no single-file lines. For lack of a less hokey phrase, we’re all in this together — though we’re not all facing the same stakes.

Patricia Arquette’s speech was a big deal during an event that rarely goes beyond pretty pictures and momentary suspense. It raised awareness of the critical need for equal pay for equal work. It’s really that simple: women deserve to be paid what they earn. Arquette’s missteps also sparked a conversation about the intersectionalities we aren’t giving enough attention to. But it’s really exhausting for people who fall between the margins to only have these conversations when someone gets it wrong. Here’s hoping that next time, we’re celebrating inclusion at the outset, not asking for it in hindsight.