The gender pay gap has been a contentious issue in the worlds of politics, finance and, perhaps most publicly, Hollywood. Actresses Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, Sandra Bullock, and most recently, Emmy Rossum have all advocated for female actors to get equal pay to men.
But actress Taraji P. Henson says she’s not taking up the battle for pay equity. In the upcoming biographical film, “Hidden Figures,” she stars as Katherine Johnson, the African American physicist and mathematician who calculated flight trajectories for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon.
Henson said her conversations with the real-life Johnson gave her amplified perspective on her own life as an actress after she learned of the now-98-year-old’s grit and resilience.
“When I get a question about diversity in Hollywood, I don’t sit and go, ‘Yeah, well they really don’t pay me and there aren’t enough roles.’ That’s not my story. I own six properties. Hollywood has been damn good to me,” she said during a press conference in NYC on Sunday.
“Now, you can ask me if they don’t pay me what I deserve — that’s the question. But then go to the studios. I don’t know! I do the work. Talk to the studios; why are you asking me? I don’t write the checks. But it [talking to Johnson] gave me a new sense of ‘stop complaining.’
Johnson became a part of the early NASA team after working on a team of African American technical mathematicians. She then got transferred to Langley’s Flight Research Division, a segregated workplace that forced her to run to the opposite side of the center to use restrooms apart from her white colleagues. Instead of bemoaning her inability to share a restroom with her white colleagues, Taraji said Johnson was laser-focused on her work, and quite frankly, didn’t have time to think about being a champion for female or black rights.
Rethinking ‘diversity’
Henson said it’s vital to think about diversity in broader terms, beyond even race and gender.
Gesturing to her co-star Octavia Spencer, who plays mathematician Dorothy Johnson Vaughan in the film, Henson said, “You bring up a good point — I hate when people bring up diversity because the first thing you jump to is black and white. When you’re talking about diversity [it should include] women being hired in front of and behind the camera, disabled people, LGBTQ community… I hate when people think about the word diversity because they look at the black actor and are like “Go!’ That’s just scratching the surface.”
In a controversial response to what many of her peers in the industry are fighting for, Henson takes a seemingly individualistic approach. She hopes her personal career can be a testament to the power of perseverance, just as Johnson’s was.
“[Katherine] knew her hard work was going to open up doors for somebody coming behind her, so she never complained. It just was what it was,” Henson said.
“Listen, life is spiritual warfare. If you don’t know that, you’re doomed. We’re never going to be equal. It’s always going to be love vs. hate. The sun is constantly chasing the mood. We’ve struggled with that as humans within ourselves every day. As a society, we’re going to struggle. So you just have to choose when you wake up — what side am I going to be on today, or for the rest of this life? Then do the work and hopefully your legacy is changing things. That’s all we can do as humans.”
Henson’s perspective appears remarkably distinct from the collective voice of some women in Hollywood who advocate for pay equity in an outspoken manner. It is also a reminder that progress does not happen overnight.
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