Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence made headlines two days ago with an endearingly candid dispatch in Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s newsletter, Lenny, about pay inequity in Hollywood. It’s a striking piece that makes clear what it’s like to learn that you’re paid less than your colleagues. But it was also notable in that Lawrence put the blame on herself for not negotiating harder and asking for more.

“When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need. (I told you it wasn’t relatable, don’t hate me),” Lawrence wrote. “But if I’m honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’ At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’ This could be a young-person thing. It could be a personality thing. I’m sure it’s both. But this is an element of my personality that I’ve been working against for years, and based on the statistics, I don’t think I’m the only woman with this issue. Are we socially conditioned to behave this way?“

That’s a worthwhile question to ask, especially considering how many women have to advocate for themselves when they negotiate over salary and job conditions. It’s the subject of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” and countless other advice guides and online articles. But it’s also a question that lets a very important set of people off the hook: What were Jennifer Lawrence’s agents and managers doing letting her get underpaid?

“Jennifer Lawrence should blame her agents, not herself for not getting paid enough. They do the negotiating,” Women and Hollywood editor (and my former editor) Melissa Silverstein pointed out on Twitter shortly after the Lenny essay published. Agents are supposed to secure the best possible deals for their clients. And it’s awfully depressing, given how brightly Lawrence shines in the Hollywood firmament, that her agents might have decided that the ceiling on the best possible deal was determined by her gender.

In reporting out the reasons that Hollywood remains so overwhelmingly white and male in every area from starring roles to writers rooms, agents and agencies have come up again and again. When I spoke to Adam Moore, the head of equal opportunity employment and diversity efforts for the combined Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, earlier this year, he emphasized how challenging it had been to convince agents to send in diverse candidates for roles that they believed were coded to be white and male.

There’s no question that it’s useful to have actresses like Jennifer Lawrence acting as pacesetters, making the obvious point that women who are just as valuable at the box office as men ought to make the same money. But they shouldn’t have to make the case alone. There’s an entire infrastructure that is supposed to bust down doors, making sure talented actors get great parts, and making sure actors get paid what they’re actually worth. It’s an embarrassing failure of imagination when creative executives prove that they lack the imagination to visualize heroes and villains who aren’t white and male. But it’s even worse when Hollywood’s dollars-and-cents people can’t even live up to their basic job descriptions.

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