Why There Are So Few Women On The Global Celebrity 100 List

Katy Perry is one of just 16 women on the Global Celebrity 100 list of highest-earning celebrities (Credit: Jamel Toppin for Forbes)

This year's Global Celebrity 100 list of the 100 highest-earning entertainers features only 16 women—who earned a combined $809 million, compared to the men's $4.35 billion. The disproportionate showing reflects the gender pay gap endemic to Hollywood and the world.

Katy Perry and Taylor Swift are the only women in the top 10, earning an estimated $135 million and $80 million pretax respectively. Female musicians were relatively well represented with seven women making the cut. That increases to nine - and 18 on the whole list - when the female members of Fleetwood Mac are included.

"I am proud of my position as a boss, as a person that runs my own company," said FORBES' cover subject Perry, who clocked 124 tour dates to lead musical millionaires Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Miranda Lambert and Jennifer Lopez on the ranking.

The Complete Celebrity 100 List

Small screen stars are also knocking at the boys' club door. Ellen DeGeneres earned an impressive $75 million, while Judge Judy Sheindlin, The Big Bang Theory's Kaley Cuco-Sweeting and Modern Family's Sofia Vergara rounded out the highly-paid female TV stars.

Actresses were a sadder story: Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson were the only female film stars to make the Global Celebrity 100.

Lawrence made headlines this year when Wikileaks revealed she and her female American Hustle costar received a lower cut of profits than their male counterparts. The leaked Sony correspondence relayed Lawrence's representatives complaining that male actors (Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner) received a 9% cut of profits, while Lawrence and Amy Adams pocketed just 7%.

Though top women can earn between $10 million to $20 million a film with the option to negotiate a share of the movie's profits, Lawrence's Hunger Games is one of the only major movies with a woman as its main character. This means it’s much rarer for women to get the sort of blockbuster role which would warrant the massive backend deals many male counterparts demand (Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible or Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, for example).

"The really top [female] stars get paid the same thing as their male counterparts, the problem is the averages don't work because there are not enough parts for women to star in for them to get paid," explained Sony's former co-chair Amy Pascal, then one of two female studio heads with Universal's Donna Langley, in a 2013 interview with FORBES' Dorothy Pomerantz.

So where are the Hollywood women in 2015? Sandra Bullock clocked an impressive $51 million in 2014's ranking thanks to her solo payday in Gravity, but a quiet 12 months took her out of the running this year. Other seemingly big stars, such as Emma Stone, have yet to see their earnings catch up with their status. Even Melissa McCarthy, who has proven her ability to carry an action/comedy movie solo with Spy, St. Vincent and Tammy failed to break the Celebrity 100's $29 million barrier to entry.

The movie pay gap is even more obscene overseas. In Bollywood, a top male star might earn the equivalent of $4.7 million. In contrast, prominent Indian actresses rarely receive one sixth of that - the equivalent of some $780,000. This year, three Bollywood actors made the cut – not a single Bollywood actress did.

In the U.S., Tinseltown's tragic pay gap is persistent industry-wide in salaries of all scales. On average, white women get paid 78 cents to every dollar a white man makes, while Hispanic women earn 56 cents to a white male's dollar, Black women 64 cents and Native American women just 59 cents to that.

Modeling is one of the few industries were women make more than men. Yet Gisele Bundchen, who earned $44 million in the last 12 months before taxes and fees, was the only model on the ranking.

So what can be done? It is impossible to inspire everyday women to strive for financial fortitude when the few accomplished women who are making bank won't own their success by discussing it, dollar amounts included. All of the top-earning female actresses on the list declined to be featured for FORBES magazine's 6 million readers in a way that would discuss their triumphs—perhaps because they “feel like it's flaunting or flashy," suggested Perry.

In contrast, the three male screen stars we ended up profiling - Jackie Chan, Gordon Ramsay and Vin Diesel - readily agreed. "I have more money than I'll ever need," Ramsay boasted.

Perry cited FORBES' recent cover story on Honest Company's Jessica Alba as inspiration to appear on the cover herself. "You have a perception of her as this actress that does these types of films, but now you see her on the cover of Forbes... it's really like a mark [that] you have made it," Perry said.

Until more women in the spotlight have the courage to claim their success as their own, women around the world will have too few role models to show them what is professionally possible.

"I'm not here to brag," said Perry. "I'm here to inspire other females."


