Patricia Arquette Is Getting Closer to Narrowing the Gender Pay Gap
Credit: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Hammer Museum
Patricia Arquette has teamed up with the United Nations in the hopes of winning the gender pay gap battle once and for all.
The Oscar-winning actress and activist has joined forces with two-time Olympic gold medalist and U.S. women's soccer team caption Abby Wambach, as well as representatives from public, private, and political sectors to launch the Equal Pay Platform of Champions. Their goal is to bring awareness to the plight of women around the world, who, on average, only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men for work of equal value.
"In all fields, at all levels of society, and across all countries, wage inequalities between men and women is a blatant reality, which impacts the lives of many. How much longer are we going to allow it? By joining this Platform, I am determined to shed light on this entrenched form of discrimination and help efforts to put an end to the gender pay gap," Arquette said in a statement at the U.N. General Assembly in New York Monday.
Although the global pay gap is 23 percent, it's considerably larger in other industrialized countries. According to the U.N., in their lifetimes, women in Sweden and France can expect to earn 31 percent less than men. In Germany, women earn 49 percent less, and in Turkey, the gap currently stands at a staggering 75 percent.
"The gender pay gap reflects the unjustifiably diminished position of many women in society and helps to keep them there. It affects every country across the world and is now coming under full scrutiny," U.N. Women executive director, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, said in a statement. "I am confident the Equal Pay Champions will help to make this flagrant inequality a thing of the past through their advocacy efforts,"
Arquette, 48, became the unofficial spokesperson of the equal pay movement after delivering an impassioned acceptance speech at the 2015 Oscars, after receiving the Best Supporting Actress award for her role in Boyhood. "To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody's equal rights," Arquette said as she accepted the award. "It is our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights in the United States of America."
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Arquette will kick off a new U.N. Women online campaign, #StopTheRobbery, which aims to bring awareness to the importance of women's economic empowerment. #StopTheRobbery invites people to spread the word by sharing tweets in support of gender equality. Cleverly, 23 percent of the characters in each tweet will be blacked-out to symbolize women across the world are in effect being "robbed" of that same amount of pay.
