‘I’m over trying to find the adorable way to state my opinion,’ the Oscar winner says of her disappointment at finding she was paid less than her male co-stars

Jennifer Lawrence has come out hard against the gender pay inequality in Hollywood, in an impassioned essay she wrote for her friend Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter newsletter.

The Hunger Games actor for the first time addresses revelations from the Sony hack that she earned considerably less than her male co-stars in American Hustle, despite her major role in the film and bankable status as a Hollywood A-lister and Oscar winner.

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“When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony,” she writes. “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.”

She writes that a need “to be liked” and the fear of seeming “difficult” or “spoiled” kept her from demanding more money.

“This could be a young-person thing,” she writes. “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 … Could there still be a lingering habit of trying to express our opinions in a certain way that doesn’t ‘offend’ or ‘scare’ men?”

Lawrence peppers her essay with her trademark self-deprecating tone: “It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable.”

She writes that she has kept mostly quiet until now on the subject of feminism because she tends to veer away from topics that she fears are “trending”. “I’m even the asshole who didn’t do anything about the ice-bucket challenge – which was saving lives – because it started to feel more like a ‘trend’ than a cause,” she writes. “I should have written a check, but I fucking forgot, OK? I’m not perfect.”

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Lawrence’s essay is notable for its anger, something the actor rarely expresses during interviews.



“I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable,” she writes. “Fuck that.”

Forbes recently ranked Lawrence as the highest-paid female actor of 2015. Since the Sony leak, Lawrence made headlines for negotiating a higher salary than Chris Pratt, her co-star in the upcoming blockbuster Passengers. Pratt will earn $12m for the film, while Lawrence will net $20m upfront or 30% of the film’s profits.

Lawrence joins a long list of actors including Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Patricia Arquette, Cate Blanchett and Rose McGowan who in recent months have spoken up about misogyny in the entertainment industry. Last week, Ashley Judd alleged for the first time publicly that she was sexually harassed in the 90s by a mogul for a major film studio.