Women have more rights, and women do have their own power in the world.
I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.
Every day that a woman is making less money, that's less money she has in retirement.
To really be known and really let someone else be known is very vulnerable. It's a weird thing. Just being an actress in Hollywood is very vulnerable. To let all these other people decide whether you're really of value or not, you have to really be strong to know that, of course, they have a right to their opinion, but their opinion doesn't matter as far as yourself.
I'm excited about the state of women's spiritual life and interior life and who women are. I wish the political establishment would catch up, because we still don't have equal rights in America.
It concerns me when people frame the conversation about equal pay about the entertainment business. I don't want the wage gap issue to be viewed as this myopic problem, because it's not. It's in 98 percent of all businesses, and it's easy for people to dismiss this conversation when they think it's around white women entertainers. But this is about all women in America.
I know when we were really little, my mom would say to me, "If you can, the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, just get quiet and ask God, 'Who is Patricia?' You can feel your own nature and know who you are."
There was a time when only men could provide or work, and still a lot of countries are like that. But there's a price to be paid for that when you're expected to be the full-time caretaker and you're expected to be the full-time breadwinner.
Of course, a lot of courtship and dating is about sexual attraction. If you're an attractive person, you have that sort of interest from people, whether you cater to it or not, but when you get older, that's not really the leading thing anymore.
What I did find out because I grew up with a lot of chaos early on: sometimes, you're born into a family, and their norm is already in your red zone of dangerous feeling or feeling too chaotic. You don't get to really do anything about that when you're a kid.
There are so many issues that impact women. When we talk about prison reform, for example, women were [once] sterilized in women's prisons. When they were giving birth, they were asked to sign paperwork but they weren't even completely conscious of what they were signing. That sounds like something that would never happen in America, but it was happening, not just in America, but in [California], one of the most progressive states in the United States.
It's going to take from 40 to 118 years for the pay gap to close for women if we just go along with the status quo, so we need some serious, radical change.
I was a single mom at 20. A lot of choices came out of that. I've seen a lot of my friends be in relationships they didn't want to be in because they couldn't leave.
Older homeless people are more likely to be women, because they don't have pensions and they are caretakers, so they withdraw from the workforce and end up having no pension if their husband leaves them, so the whole thing is just a nightmare.
The number-one reason women say they returned to their abuser is financial insecurity. Often they have kids with them. They say half of the 66 million women and kids living in poverty in the US wouldn't be if women were just paid their full dollar. That's an enormous impact we could make on child hunger.
When I talk to different lawmakers, I'm trying to get them to reach across the aisle. There's legislation out there that would be helpful for women and families, but like with the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation has been on the floor many times, and voted down many times. It's something we need to get passed already.
I worry about women globally. When we talk about having a presidential candidate who would tear up the Paris accords, who doesn't believe in global warming, we know that poor women and children are going to be the most vulnerable when we start seeing rapid effects of global warming.
In the United States we have more women in poverty than any other industrialized nation.
The average woman loses a half million dollars over a lifetime, but women with higher degrees lose $2 million over a lifetime.
We have Latinas in California making 55 cents on the dollar. Black women making 63 cents on the dollar. White women making 78 cents on the dollar. It doesn't change very much year by year, it might go up or down a penny, but oftentimes, the years that it goes up are the same years that men are making a little bit more. It's pretty much always in proportion.
We have states that are throwing away the DNA of rapists. How can a woman be so inconsequential, that we as a nation aren't standing up and doing something about this intimate, violent act?
I'm very grateful to have my kids in my life; they're my greatest teachers. But to pretend it's always easy is just not really true.
There's something I really like about network TV. You have this humongous audience, tens of millions of people, and you really can be in a little hut in Thailand; you really can be in the middle of an apartment in Dubai. There's something about public entertainment that I always liked. I like smaller movies, and I like public entertainment.
There's a ripple effect in being underpaid for women. Ten thousand women are turned down every day for domestic abuse shelters. Part of domestic abuse is often economic suppression; the male might take your paycheck every week and never give you money or allow you to work because he's too jealous.
It's important for me as an actor to be able to make a living.
