The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School THE FRAMEWORK OF CELEBRITY IN GENDER PAY GAP DISCOURSE A Thesis in Communications by Katelynn A. Hartman © 2020 Katelynn A. Hartman Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts December 2020 The thesis of Kate Hartman was reviewed and approved by the following: Stephanie L. Morrow Associate Teaching Professor of Speech Communications Thesis Adviser Peter J. Kareithi Associate Professor of Communications Frederika E. Schmitt Associate Professor of Criminology, Sociology and Anthropology Millersville University Special Signatory Craig Welsh Associate Professor of Communications and Humanities Professor-in-Charge, Master of Arts in Communications ii ABSTRACT Celebrity has long been used as a criterion for newsworthiness due to their name recognition and ability to draw readership. Celebrity involvement in a cause or issue can bring a level of attention that is not attainable by a non-celebrity. However, their involvement also has the ability to shape, change, or overshadow the issue. When the news media frame’s a celebrity’s story as a prime example of a larger issue, complex realities and nuanced components of that issue can be lost in favor of splashy headlines and celebrity names. This comparison of two celebrity stories of the gender pay gap aims to explore how celebrity can be used as a framing device by the media, and what is lost or overshadowed by that framing. The two examples in question are that of the pay gap between actors Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg for reshoots on the 2018 film “All the Money in the World,” and the culminating legislation signing by President Barack Obama in the case of Lilly Ledbetter who rose to prominence as a result of her pay discrimination at her former employer Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Key Words: celebrity, gender pay gap, media framing, #MeToo, Time’s Up, HeForShe iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………..vi Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………vii Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..................1 Chapter 2: HISTORY…………………………………………………………………………...6 2.1 Gender Pay Gap…………………………………………………………….................6 2.2 Women in News Industry……………………………………………………………..9 2.3 Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co./………………………………................12 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act 2.4 HeForShe…………………………………………………………………………….14 2.5 #MeToo………………………………………………………………………………15 2.6 Time’s Up…………………………………………………………………................17 Chapter 3: LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………………………19 3.1 Feminist Issues in the Media…………………………………………………………20 3.2 Gender Pay Gap……………………………………………………………………...26 3.3 Celebrity Influence…………………………………………………………..............30 Chapter 4: THEORY…………………………………………………………………………..35 4.1 Newsworthiness Theory……………………………………………………………..36 4.2 Agenda-Setting Theory………………………………………………………………37 iv 4.3 Framing Theory……………………………………………………………………38 4.4 Encoding-Decoding………………………………………………………………..40 Chapter 5: METHODOLOGY………………………………………………………………41 Chapter 6: INTRODUCTION OF SOURCES……………………………………………..44 6.1 “All the Money in the World” Sources…………………………………………….45 6.2 Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Sources………………………………47 Chapter 7: ANALYSIS……………………………………………………………………….50 7.1 Analysis of “All the Money in the World” Sources…………………………..........51 7.2 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act Sources…………………………………58 7.3 Case Study Comparison……………………………………………………………64 Chapter 8: DISCUSSION…………………………………………………………………….71 8.1 Interpretations and Implications……………………………………………………71 8.2 Limitations and Recommendations………………………………………………...76 Chapter 9: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..77 Appendix A: “All the Money in the World” News Coverage…………………………........80 Appendix B: Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co…………………………………..82 Sources News Coverage References……………………………………………………………………………………..83 v List of Tables Table 1.1 – Frame representation in “All the Money in the World” sources Table 1.2 - Frame representation in “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act” sources vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Thank you to my thesis adviser, Dr. Stephanie Morrow, for her ongoing support during this process, and to my other committee members, Drs. Peter Kareithi and Frederika Schmitt, for their input and guidance. Special thanks to my family and friends who allowed me to bounce ideas off them and put up with my frustration during this process in an especially challenging year. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The gender pay gap has been a reality for working women for more than half a century. The knowledge that a woman needs to work twice as hard for half as much as her male counterparts is so commonplace that it is hardly shocking. What is shocking is the continued lack of clarity around the causes of the gender pay gap, and the continued work that is necessary to balance the scales between male and female workers. While the United States as a country has come so far—from job listings that deliberately limited female applicants in the 1940s and 1950s (Darity & Mason, 1998) to women achieving advanced degrees at a higher rate than men in the 2010s (Blau & Kahn, 2017)—the conversation about the gender pay gap is as prevalent in the public discourse as it ever was. Many issues have been identified as the cause of or contributing to the gender pay gap, which is defined as the “median annual pay for all women who work full time and year-round, compared to a similar cohort of men” (Vagins, 2019, para. 1). Causes include occupational sex segregation, female education, the child penalty, and direct pay discrimination. Some of these are still identified as underlying causes today. The American Association of University Women (AAUW)’s “The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap” report, states that the typical American woman earns $45,097, and the typical American man earns $55,291 (2019). This equates to an average statistic of women earning only “82 cents for every dollar paid to men” (“The Simple Truth,” 2019, para. 2). This does not represent the larger pay disparities experienced by women of color. For instance, black women earn 62 percent of what white men earn, and Hispanic women earn just 54 percent (“The Simple Truth,” 2019). Additionally, the way this topic is understood by the larger society is influenced by the context of the time, the environment in which it is being discussed, and the way it is being 1 framed by the media. The complexity of the gender pay gap as a topic makes it difficult to discuss in its entirety in the public realm. Often one or two stories are used as simplified examples of an intricate issue. In 2017 and 2018, in the context of the media’s coverage of the #MeToo, Time’s Up and HeForShe movements, when feminist issues were receiving renewed media coverage and public awareness, female celebrities in the entertainment, music, and sports industries were given the platform to expose their own pay disparities. Celebrity stories became the most visible examples of the gender pay gap, and shaped the way the public understood the issue. The most famous example during this time was the pay disparity between actors Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg for reshoots on their film, “All the Money in the World.” This example serves as one of the case studies in this thesis and is explained further in this chapter. Celebrities, such as Williams, who chose to speak publicly about their own pay disparities served to further feminist rhetoric during this time and provided concrete examples of the gender pay gap as an issue in the national conversation. This story and others made the gender pay gap a critical component of the zeitgeist of these times. This recent experience of a celebrity story bringing a spotlight to the gender pay gap as an issue is juxtaposed with the historic example of Lilly Ledbetter who, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, gained public notoriety when she sued her former employer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., for pay discrimination over the course of her employment. Ledbetter did not start her quest for equal pay as a celebrity, but she became one through news coverage both in papers and on television. President Barak Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act into law in 2009 as the first legislation of his presidency. His own celebrity status centered public attention on this case and the gender pay gap in general. 2 These two cases are compared in this thesis to answer the following questions: a. How is celebrity used as a device to explain the gender pay gap in public discourse? b. How is the use of celebrity shaping the public’s understanding of the issue—both currently and historically? c. What aspects of the discussion are omitted or overlooked based on the way the topic is framed through the lens of celebrity? Celebrities, through their public recognition and cultural cache, are able to bring attention to an issue and assert pressure for change through publicity. That is precisely what celebrities attempted to do with the gender pay gap both in 2018 through social and traditional media and 2009 through legislation and news coverage. These tactics combine to demonstrate how deeply rooted this discrimination is in our society. And the mainstream media—defined as, “the elite media” or “the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates” (Chomsky, 1997, p. 6)—utilized celebrity stories because of the viewership that comes with a celebrity name. The large sums