As Priyanka Chopra makes it to the list of the top 100 Women by BBC, she recalls being underpaid with only 10 percent of the heros remuneration.
Priyanka Chopra has made her name on the list of the top 100 global icons across countries. Being our nation’s pride, she has progressed remarkably in her film career and has made a name for herself in multiple pedestals. Adding another feather to her cap, she was recently felicitated under BBC’s Top 100 Women Of The Year list.
Well, PeeCee’s journey to the peak was not a smooth one, and she had to bear a fair share of trials and tribulations to reach the threshold of success. From nasty controversies, to ugly catfights and getting underpaid, she has beared it all. During a recent interaction during her felicitation, she recalled one such experience of getting severely underpaid, than that of her male peers.
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During an interview post receiving the award by BBC, Priyanka recalled a bitter experience during her Bollywood career, when she was highly underpaid, and to be precise received only 10% of what the leading hero was paid. Stating it as a constant battle for her as well as the other female peers, Priyanka mentioned:
“I've never had pay parity in Bollywood. I would get paid about 10% of the salary of my male co-actor. It's (the pay gap) 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," she said. "My generation of female actors have definitely asked (for equal pay). We've asked, but we've not got it."
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Not only this, but Priyanka also revealed how she was a victim of bearing the brunt of her male co-stars earning special privileges during the shooting of a film. In her words:
“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."
Further in the interview, Priyanka also revealed the bitter experiences she had because of her dusky skin tone. She mentioned that she faced severe criticism as well as body-shaming in front of her fair-toned co-stars. In her words:
I was called ‘black cat’, ‘dusky’. I mean, what does ‘dusky’ even mean in a country where we are literally all are brown? I thought I was not pretty enough, I believed that I would have to work a lot harder, even though I thought I was probably a little bit more talented than my fellow actors who were lighter skinned. But I thought that was right because it was so normalised.”
For the unversed, Priyanka was crowned as Miss World in the year 2000, before she marked her debut in Bollywood. Spanning across a time of 20 golden years, PeeCee has made it big and has never looked back since. She was also awarded the Padma Shri in the year 2016. Fast forward to today, Priyanka is happily married to the love of her life and popular American pop singer, Nick Jonas, and is also a proud mom to her adorable daughter, Malti Marie Chopra Jonas.
What do you think about Priyanka’s experience in Bollywood?
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