More Men Than Women Worked on The Acolyte and Were Paid More

Television

The Force may be female, but Disney’s workforce sure isn’t, at least on its new female-led show. By now, you’ve been inundated with the messaging that Star Wars is all about girl power – and will be for the foreseeable future – and the fan base is a bunch of evil men who hate women and are probably racist, too. But it turns out this is not only defensiveness but projection because, despite appearances in front of the camera, The Acolyte employed many more men than women and paid them much more to boot. The story comes from Forbes via filings with the UK government:

“According to the filings, in early April last year, when production of the streaming series was still in full swing, just 30% of the 695 employees were female and across the entire workforce, women’s average hourly pay was 19.4% lower than men’s.”

“Not only does this show that the average hourly pay of the women who worked on The Acolyte was 19.4% less than men received but it was also 13.5% lower when taking the middle number if hourly pay is ranked from highest to lowest. What’s more, although men outnumber women in the bottom and two middle hourly pay bands, 53% of the employees in the highest hourly pay band were also male.”

The rest of the article does what it can to say how awesome Disney is for driving Star Wars into the ground while those evil fans complained (up to and including denigrating the original trilogy, right on cue), but they can’t ruin how hilarious this story is. After berating fans and patting themselves on the back for how wonderfully feminist they are, the folks at Disney and Lucasfilm hired mostly men to make their most female-centric piece of entertainment yet, and they paid them more! That tells me that their girl power nonsense was all a veneer, there to shield them from criticism while pushing a social message they refuse to abide by. Sure, they got a woman to be the showrunner, the writers are mostly women, and the main characters are mostly women, but behind the scenes, it’s almost as male-dominated as the fan base.

And the best part is that normal people wouldn’t care about this if the show were any good and Disney and Lucasfilm weren’t proclaiming their virtue on this issue, especially in contrast to what they call Star Wars fans. Media rags would piss and moan, but fans just want to enjoy the show and don’t care who makes it. Now, they’re revealed as a bunch of typical Hollywood hypocrites, little different than movie stars who lecture the rest of us about global warming while flying around in private jets. And considering the backpedaling they’ve been doing on the show’s identity politics agenda, it looks like they’re getting what they deserve: another failure to add to their list.