‘Hi Lynne, I have an upcoming project, can you audition and provide a price quote? Here are the specs…’ I read a direct invitation email sent from an online voice casting website. The invitation was from Diane Cricchio, President of Timeline Video, a digital and broadcast media production company, whom I had met in a project meeting years before.
Timeline Video was seeking auditions from men and women for a particular TV project. I booked as the woman and we had our scheduled recording session. After our session, we began to chat and it was clear Diane wanted to share something she learned through the online casting process.
FEMALES ASKED FOR LESS MONEY
She told me that there was quite a discrepancy along gender lines regarding the price quotes she received. The majority of women were quoting $200 and some quoted as low as $50! The men’s average quote was within acceptable industry standard compensation – between $ 500 and $800 for this TV project. She was in absolute shock with the lowball offers she received from the women vs. the men for the same project. The national gender wage gap crisis is certainly not late breaking news. It has been an issue for decades, but a self-inflicted wage gap?!? The women’s average quote was well below market standard and in her words ‘insulting to our gender’.
IGNORED ‘LOW BALL’ QUOTE AUDITIONS
Diane said was unmotivated to listen to the lowball auditions because if these women did not value themselves how could she consider hiring them? She never announced that the lowest offer would get the gig. The low bidders did not feel like professionals to her.
SELF-SABOTAGING THEMSELVES
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research states “Women are the sole or co-breadwinner in half of American families with children. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men. In 2017, female full-time, year-round workers made only 80.5 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent.” I began to wonder – why are women self-sabotaging themselves professionally?
I asked Diane if I could share her experience and her thoughts. I felt that hearing a client’s take on low quotes would be valuable information for our VO sisterhood. She chose to share her experience to help other women. She said “we women have to support and encourage one another.”
START WITH RATE GUIDES
I have found the Global Voice Acting Academy’s Rate Guide to be a helpful resource. It is bookmarked on my computer and I refer to it often. These compensation figures are reasonable starting points for negotiation.
Backstage also has an interesting article written by casting director Kate McClanaghan: What to Charge as a Voiceover Artist concerning how VO lowballing can present inherent dangers, and why it is a poor idea.
I understand there will always be newbies and those just happy to book, as well as producers with slim budgets, but please, I implore my low balling colleagues, know your worth and how it is perceived!
The How to Abandon Ship exhibit is currently running at our United States Merchant Marine Academy Museum in Kings Point, NY on the north shore of Long Island through March 2017. It tells the story of the American freighter Robin Moor which was steaming from New York City to Cape Town, South Africa on May 21, 1941. Before dawn, a Nazi German U-boat stopped the American ship (the US had not yet entered World War II) and gave the crew and passengers a few minutes to launch the ship’s lifeboats. They then torpedoed and shelled the hapless freighter, leaving four lifeboats with some eight passengers and thirty-eight merchant seamen to fend for themselves in the middle of the ocean. After fourteen grueling days, the survivors of three lifeboats were taken to Cape Town, South Africa. The fourth lifeboat was picked up after eighteen days and taken to Recife, Brazil. Remarkably, nobody died in the incident, although one young mariner tragically committed suicide while on his way home.
The Exhibit gets its name from the book, How to Abandon Ship, co-authored by John Banigan, the Robin Moor’s third officer who skillfully navigated his lifeboat almost to the coast of Brazil. The exhibit endeavors to tell this story, both in its historical and human dimensions. It uses a specially-commissioned ship model, painting and a small book entitled Outrageous and Indefensible to explore these dimensions. It also uses photographs taken by survivors in the lifeboats, recreated radio broadcasts from 1941, a detailed journal by Berta Cohn of New York City who relates both the good and the bad in her empathetic but honest account of survival at sea.