After deciding to start a family, actress Zöe Saldana found out what many women learn, namely that businesses are often not family-friendly.
The trouble began once she became pregnant with her twins.
“Let me tell you something, it will never be the right time for anybody in your life that you get pregnant,” said Saldana. “The productions I was slated to work on sort of had a panic. I heard through the grapevine there was even a conversation of me being written off of one of the projects.”
Saldana couldn’t believe the attitude. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are you kidding me? It’s this bad?’ Right when I just feel super-duper happy, is that inconvenient for you? That me, as a woman in my thirties, I finally am in love and I am finally starting my life? And it’s (screwing) your schedule up? Really?”
What angered her even more was that studios “spend more money sometimes ‘perking’ up male superstars in a movie,” paying for private jets, assistants, bodyguards or booking “a really phat penthouse or them staying in a yacht instead of them staying on land.”
The same is not true for women, Saldana claimed. “But then a woman comes in going, ‘OK, I have a child. You’re taking me away from my home. You’re taking my children away from their home. And you’re going to make me work a lot more hours than I usually would if I was home. Therefore, I would have to pay for this nanny for more hours — so I kind of need that. And they go, ‘Nope, we don’t pay for nannies.'”
But Saldana loves her work in spite of trying to be a good actress and a good mother at the same time. “The battle will always be in trying to balance it out,” she said. “That’s the most exhausting thing, the balance of it all. But it helps when you’re doing it with your companion. If I know Marco is trying to balance it as well, then I feel like I’m not alone.”
Source: USA Today
