Closing the gender pay gap remains on the to-do list across numerous countries and cultures around the world. And when it comes to the differences in pay checks between men and women in the movie and television industry, the pay gap prevails. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who has found success in Bollywood and Hollywood, recently shared her own experiences dealing with acting salaries over the years.
On average, for every dollar men earn, women earn 77 cents. When speaking to her time working in India’s film industry, Chopra Jonas said this:
I’ve never had pay parity in Bollywood. I would get paid about 10% of the salary of my male co-actor. [The pay gap] is large, substantially large. And so many women still deal with that. I’m sure I will too if I worked with a male co-actor now in Bollywood. My generation of female actors have definitely asked [for equal pay]. We’ve asked, but we’ve not got it.
When speaking to the Independent, Priyanka Chopra Jonas shared an unfortunate pay gap between genders in so much worse than the United States is dealing with. She got real about Indian women making 90% less as a male actor. Even more surprising is the fact that even today, the actress believes she would make the same amount despite being such a huge name. Chopra Jonas continued by saying this:
I thought it was absolutely ok to sit for hours and hours on set, while my male co-actor just took his own time, and decided whenever he wanted to show up on set is when we would shoot.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas made a name for herself as the lead of ABC’s Quantico from 2015 to 2018, where she played one of the best South Asian characters in recent TV. Since then, she’s starred in numerous Hollywood films, like being part of the cast of The Matrix Resurrections, along with getting into producing on projects like Blumhouse horror movie Evil Eye and Netflix’s The White Tiger. Chopra Jonas has shared that her “quest” as a producer is to “influx Hollywood with brown people, because we don't see enough of us.”
When it comes to South Asian and Indian representation in Hollywood, Chopra Jonas also told the outlet that she thinks there’s “still a long way to go” even though she believes she’s built a “certain amount of credibility” in her own career and is “doing interesting work.” There are plenty of upcoming Priyanka Chopra Jonas movies and TV coming our way too.
Among them is a 2023 movie release called Love Again starring the actress alongside Outlander’s Sam Heughan. It’s a romantic comedy based on the novel Text For You and is about a woman who loses her fiancé and decides to send romantic texts to his old cell phone number, which leads her to form a new connection with the man the number was reassigned to. The movie is set to be released on May 12. As Chopra continues to thrive in her career in Hollywood and Bollywood, it’s certainly insightful to know her thoughts on the pay gap.
