Chris Rock Speaks on Gender Inequality: Black Women Have It Much Harder Than Jennifer Lawrence

JLaw wrote an essay on gender inequality earlier this year.

Image via Comedy Central

When Jennifer Lawrence penned a passionate essay on Hollywood's inarguable gender inequality problem for Lena Dunham's Lenny newsletter earlier this year, many of the Joy star's peers awesomely came forward to offer their support. "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," JLaw acknowledged in the opening lines of the essay. "I didn’t want to seem 'difficult' or 'spoiled.' At the time, that seemed like a fine idea, until I saw the payroll on the Internet and realized every man I was working with definitely didn’t worry about being 'difficult' or 'spoiled.'"

In a recentNew Yorker profile of Saturday Night Live star and soon-to-be Ghostbuster Leslie Jones, Chris Rock added another crucial dimension to the gender pay gap criticism: race. "Black women have the hardest gig in show business," Rock says of Jones' career. "You hear Jennifer Lawrence complaining about getting paid less because she’s a woman—if she was black, she’d really have something to complain about."

Jones, now a household name for comedy fans across the country, adds that she faced a difficult road to reaching her current heights in a system often designed to ignore minorities. "Every black comedian in the country knew what I could do," Jones recalls. "But that doesn’t mean everyone else is paying attention."

Revisit JLaw's original essay here.

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