Former co-host Sherri Shepherd’s salary transparency regarding “The View” helped Sunny Hostin become an advocate for equal pay.
There’s nothing more beautiful than seeing women supporting women.
This week, former co-hosts of “The View,” Sunny Hostin and Sherri Shepherd, reunited on Shepherd’s new talk show, “Sherri.” In an interview set to discuss Hostin’s new novel, “Summer on Sag Harbor,” the two reflected on their shared experience being a part of what Shepherd calls a “TV sorority.”
However, in discussing “The View” sisterhood, Hostin revealed how Shepherd, who co-hosted the talk show from 2007 to 2014, helped her negotiate a better salary when she joined the panel as a full-time co-host in 2016.
“I don’t even know if you remember this, but when I signed my deal sheet, you gave me a call,” said Hostin, “… and you were like, I heard you’re coming on the show. And I was like, Yeah, I’m joining the show. [You were] like, did they give you a car stipend? I was like, No. Did they give you this? I was like, No. And I was like, let me get my deal sheet out. And you basically went over your salary for the entire time you were there. And you also gave me Jenny McCarthy’s salary.”
That moment of transparency between the two women not only made Hostin realize that her agent “did not get [her] enough money” but also gave her the needed ammunition to renegotiate her salary.
“There you go! Because I got it from Rosie. Rosie O’Donnell gave everybody’s salary and hers,” said Shepherd, crediting her actions to O’Donnell, who left the show in 2007.
In 2018, Shepherd revealed to People magazine how O’Donnell’s transparency about her contract gave her the tools to negotiate a deal similar to her fellow co-hosts on “The View.” Since then, the “SherriI” host has made it her mission to help other women joining the talk show world broker their own deals.
“You need to pay it forward,” Shepherd told Hostin.
Hostin has done just that. During a “Queens of Culture: Legends of Business” panel discussion that Forbes hosted, the Emmy Award-winning co-host shared how that phonecall with Shepherd inspired her to do the same for the women at her previous employer, CNN, and has since made her an advocate for equal pay.
Considering that Black women make 63 cents for every dollar white men make, this level of sisterhood is vital to bridge the racial and gender pay gap. As Shepherd says, we’ve “gotta stick together!”
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