Entertainment

Rachel Bloom Reveals Her 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Salary & This Is Why It Matters

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As if she wasn't doing her part for female empowerment just by being a talented, hardworking woman in Hollywood, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend star Bloom revealed her salary in an open, honest conversation with the financial magazine Wealthsimple. They covered a wide range of money-related topics, including everything from what the 30-year-old makes now to her salary as a writer coming up to her struggles to pay rent during those early days. It's the kind of clear, unvarnished looking at earnings within the industry that are going to prove invaluable to women fighting to close the gender wage gap.

Think about it. It's impossible to fight for equal wages without knowing what our peers — both male and female — are earning, so it's incredibly generous of Bloom to open up like this. Not only does she talk about how much she brings in, but she breaks it down into what's take home pay and the kinds of expenses she's faced along the way. For example, for her first writing job, she says she made about $3,500 a week, but clarifies that not all of that went into her pocket, saying, "Remember that I was paying 10 percent to a manager, 10 percent to an agent, and 5 percent to an entertainment lawyer."

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Even a simple statement like that is a great heads up to aspiring content creators about what they can expect in their chosen field. There's a lot of societal stigma attached to talking about money, and women are particularly unlikely to do do it. Carnegie Mellon University found in 2014 that women are one-quarter as likely as men to do so, as reported by Time. But Bloom is dispelling some of that stigma by shamelessly talking cold, hard cash. She never apologizes for, or tries to justify, what she makes, which suggests that she knows her worth and she's offering up this information to be transparent and help others.

Money is something we all deal with every day, so the more we talk about that reality, the less hold it has over us. Now, if you go to take your first TV writing job, you have a vague idea of the numbers you should expect to be seeing, which gives you a leg up in negotiations. For women in the industry who are trying to level the playing field, that's a huge step in the right direction. Let's take the stigma away from honest conversations about finances, because that's the only way to work toward everyone making what they deserve.