LOS ANGELES, Nov. 4 (UPI) — In an open letter, Mila Kunis confronted sexism in Hollywood and her own experiences with gender bias, saying she’s “done compromising.”
Kunis detailed two specific experiences in which she said she’d been “insulted, sidelined, paid less, creatively ignored and otherwise diminished based on my gender.”
One instance involved a producer’s threat that she’d “never work in this town again” for refusing to appear “semi-naked” on the cover of a men’s magazine.
“I was no longer willing to subject myself to a naïve compromise that I had previously been willing to,” she wrote. “‘I will never work in this town again?’ I was livid, I felt objectified, and for the first time in my career I said ‘no.’ And guess what? The world didn’t end. The film made a lot of money and I did work in this town again, and again and again. What this producer may never realize is that he spoke aloud the exact fear every woman feels when confronted with gender bias in the workplace.”
Kunis described a second instance in which, even after she started her own successful production company, she was reduced “to nothing more than my relationship to a successful man and my ability to bear children” by a network executive who referred to her as ‘”soon to be Ashton’s wife and baby momma!!'”
“Yes, it is only one small comment,” she said of the exec’s response, “but it’s these very comments that women deal with day in and day out in offices, on calls and in emails — micro-aggressions that devalue the contributions and worth of hard-working women.”
Kunis vowed to no longer overlook the instances in which she feels she is being discriminated.
“I’m done compromising; even more so, I’m done with being compromised. So from this point forward, when I am confronted with one of these comments, subtle or overt, I will address them head on,” she said.
Kunis’ letter was originally published on Medium and then picked up by A Plus magazine. Kunis said she hopes to become a voice for solidarity and change.
“If this is happening to me, it is happening more aggressively to women everywhere,” she wrote. “I am fortunate that I have reached a place that I can stop compromising and stand my ground, without fearing how I will put food on my table. I am also fortunate that I have the platform to talk about this experience in the hope of bringing one more voice to the conversation so that women in the workplace feel a little less alone and more able to push back for themselves.”
