By Lorena O'Neil
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have publicly expressed their unhappiness about about getting paid the same salaries as supporting actors on their show Grace and Frankie, despite being the leads. The show’s fans have responded to the news by creating a petition asking Netflix to fix the gender pay disparity.
“[Tomlin] found out [Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen] are getting the same salary that we are,” Fonda said at a recent Netflix press conference. “That doesn’t make us happy.”
“No," Tomlin added. "The show is not Sol and Robert — it’s Grace and Frankie.”
The petition currently has more than 7,700 signatures.
Tomlin and Fonda also serve as executive producers for the show, which focuses on how their characters cope after learning their husbands are gay and leaving them for one another.
The gender pay gap in Hollywood has been a recent topic of discussion, particularly since the Sony hack put a spotlight on how often gender discrimination occurs in the industry. The hack revealed Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams were allegedly paid less than their male counterparts for American Hustle. Charlize Theron recently requested she get paid the same as her male co-star Chris Hemsworth in the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel.
"I have to give them credit because once I asked, they said yes,” said Theron in a May interview. “They did not fight it. And maybe that’s the message: That we just need to put our foot down. This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn’t mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you’re doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way.”
“It’s time that we stop forcing women to pay what is effectively a gender tax,” said Patricia Arquette in a UN Women’s speech. “This is 2015, not 1915!”
“I started this petition because pay inequity is an issue in many different industries, and it’s important to address it anywhere that it comes up,” says Care2 petition creator Emily Logan, who is also director of acquisition and retention at Care2. "Whether we are talking about celebrities or employees at a retail store, we need to make sure that we are calling out these imbalances and doing what we can to remedy them.“
"Once the petition has a nice critical mass of signatures, I will download the signatures and send them off to the targets – the executive producers of the show as well as the VP of original programming at Netflix,” Logan tells The Hollywood
THR has reached out to Netflix for comment.