Two-time Oscar-winning actor Hilary Swank has lamented Hollywood’s continuing failure to reward female stars with the kind of pay packets their male counterparts routinely receive.

Speaking to an audience of students in Los Angeles ahead of the release of her new film The Homesman, Swank said her earnings would be dramatically higher if she were a man.

“My male counterpart will get paid 10 times more than me — 10 times,” she told students at the Loyola Marymount University School of Film & TV. “Not double, but 10 times for the same job. We only have this much left for the female actress. I mean, there’s two genders on this earth. Both are compelling, interesting, diverse, wonderful in all their own separate ways. And yet there’s an influx of male roles and there’s just not for women.”

Swank also described The Homesman, which is directed by co-star Tommy Lee Jones, as a “feminist” western.

“It’s about the objectification and trivialisation of women and it takes place in the mid 1800s,” she said. “But us women know exactly what that feels like right now in 2014 — talking about gay, lesbian, transgender issues and how far they’ve come … yet how far we still need to go. How great that Tommy Lee Jones, this person that people see as this like rough man, is at the helm of telling this feminist story.”

Swank and Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesman. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Europacorp

Jones has also been keen to highlight the feminist credentials of The Homesman. “I don’t think there’s a woman in the readership of the Guardian, not one, who hasn’t been objectified or trivialised because of her gender at one time or another. And [that inequality is] really what our movie is about,” he told this newspaper’s Rory Carroll.

Swank’s comments on gender pay disparity are largely born out by recent findings from Forbes magazine, which each year tracks the most well-remunerated actors in Hollywood. Though the true male to female ratio – at least for the top Hollywood stars – appears to be closer to 2:1 than 10:1.

Sandra Bullock, this year’s highest-paid female star, earned $51m (£32.6m) over the previous 12 months, $17m more than second-placed Jennifer Lawrence, according to Forbes. But she would only have made it to third place behind Robert Downey Jr ($75m) and Dwayne Johnson ($52m) on alist of male and female actors. And the magazine estimated that members of its female top 10 earned just $226m, compared to the $419m haul taken by the top 10 men, between June 2013 and June 2014.

