Actress Mila Kunis insists she’ll no longer let Hollywood hotshots belittle her after a recent encounter with a sexist studio boss.
The 33-year-old Black Swan star penned a powerful essay published on her husband Ashton Kutcher‘s website A Plus on Wednesday (02Nov16), and in the piece she outlined some of the conflicts she has experienced with sexist policies and bad behavior in Hollywood over the years.
Kunis started a production company called Orchard Farm Productions in 2014 with three other female business partners and the foursome focuses on producing quality television, but when the team successfully pitched a project to a hot shot producer recently, they were dismayed by his belittling response.
“In this email chain, this producer chose to email the following: ‘And Mila is a mega star. One of biggest actors in Hollywood and soon to be Ashton’s wife and baby momma!!!’,” she recalled. “This is the entirety of his email. Factual inaccuracies aside, he reduced my value to nothing more than my relationship to a successful man and my ability to bear children. It ignored my (and my team’s) significant creative and logistical contributions.”
Mila and her colleagues withdrew from the project entirely after receiving the email, and Kunis encourages other women in different industries to defend themselves should they ever find themselves in similar situations.
“Yes, it is only one small comment,” she wrote. “But it’s these very comments that women deal with day in and day out in offices, on calls, and in emails – microaggressions that devalue the contributions and worth of hard-working women. Subtle gender bias is oftentimes nearly imperceptible, and even wholly undetectable to those who share the bias.”
“I’m done compromising; even more so, I’m done with being compromised,” she adds, before declaring: “So from this point forward, when I am confronted with one of these comments, subtle or overt, I will address them head on; I will stop in the moment and do my best to educate.”
