Pay transparency among peers has helped many people to better negotiate their salaries.
Sherri Shepherd has become well-known as one of the leading talk show hosts in the entertainment business. Her big break into the space was in 2007 when she started on “The View,” where she was a co-host for nearly seven years. Now, Shepherd has her own syndicated daytime talk show, “Sherri.”
Sunny Hostin went on to join “The View” a few years after Shepherd left.
As a guest on Shepherd’s own show, Hostin shared how the former co-host was her saving grace when she joined the long-running ABC talk show. Hostin recounted that Shepherd called her and went over her own deal with the show, which led to a higher salary for her new co-host.
“You basically went over your salary for the entire time you were there,” Hostin told Shepard. “And you also gave me Jenny McCarthy’s salary.”
“She got me paid,” Hostin emphasized. “You gave me everyone’s salary, and I went back to my agent and I was like, ‘You did not get me enough money.’”
Shepherd said she paid it forward after Rosie O’Donnell did the same thing for her by sharing everyone’s salary when she joined “The View.”
The power of sharing salaries has helped people across industries break free from being lowballed, especially Black women.
One instance of this in Hollywood was a powerful moment between Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain, who co-starred in “The Help.”
As previously reported by AfroTech, after Chastain learned about the big pay gap between her and Spencer, she joined her in fighting for more money for women.
“I love that woman, because she’s walking the walk and she’s actually talking the talk,” Spencer emotionally recalled during the 2018 interview with BBC News. “She said: ‘You and I are going to be tied together. We’re going to be favoured nations and we’re going to make the same thing, you are going to make that amount. Fast forward to last week, we’re making five times what we asked for.”
