• Ellen Pompeo believed her $20 million annual salary on Grey’s Anatomy to be celebrated as a win for equal pay, but was warned before her 2018 Hollywood Reporter interview went live that not everyone would support her success. Pompeo highlights the double standard in how women’s earnings are scrutinized compared to men’s, while emphasizing the importance of using her financial power to uplift others.

When Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo confirmed she was being paid more than $20m a year for her work on the show, she hoped it would be celebrated as evidence of equal pay coming to Hollywood.

However, before The Hollywood Reporter interview—which revealed Pompeo’s $575,000 an episode income, plus a seven-figure signing bonus and equity points in the series estimated to be worth $13m—went live, Pompeo was warned by her manager that she may not get exclusively positive feedback.

At the time, Pompeo told the Reporter the deal had been struck as she took on the solo lead role of the medical drama, named after her character.

“I’ve finally gotten to the place where I’m OK asking for what I deserve,” Pompeo said at the time.

But in a recent podcast interview with Alex Cooper’s ‘Call Her Daddy’, Pompeo reflected that she hadn’t considered her success wouldn’t be celebrated by her peers.

She explained: “My manager said at the time something to me that literally hit me like a brick. He said: ‘Are you ready to be unpopular?’ He was like: ‘I don’t want you to think that everyone’s going to go in and cheer for you and clap for you and bow to you, and think you’re the dopest ever, cause there’s going to be a lot of people who are not happy for you.’

“That had never occurred to me … That was good prep for me because it’s true that not everybody—and other women have said [this] publicly—like generally it’s hard for people to celebrate other people if they have something that resembles something they want.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Cooper, who herself was subject to scrutiny when it was revealed she had signed at least a $60m contract to move her podcast from Barstool to Spotify.

Cooper again made headlines when her three-year deal with Spotify came to an end, and she signed a $125m deal with SiriusXM to bring her growing media empire—Unwell—to the new platform.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to get comfortable with the number being out there,” Cooper said. “My first contract when the number was leaked, I was … so proud that people know because it stands for so much. But then you get this wave of negativity, and I say it all the time … that men just do not experience this level of scrutiny when it comes to money.

“You have Jeff Bezos and Elon and Trump and all of these men get to just fucking shit money in front of our faces and everyone thinks it’s hot and powerful. And then the minute we get any of it—not even in the ballpark, we’re just lightly getting a part of the conversation—it’s like: ‘She doesn’t deserve that. Either she’s a bitch, she’d found a way to maneuver it cause she”s not worth that. And it’s a lot.”

Pompeo added: “It’s patriarchy and it’s misogyny.”

A network of power

It seems Hollywood is no different from the myriad of other industries that have a gender pay gap—in 2019, a study found that female stars, on average, earn $1.1m less than their male co-stars of similar experience.

Not only was Pompeo defying the norm by revealing her income, but she was also bucking the trend by being so highly paid as a woman.

And she’s keen to make her influence count, she added: “What helps me is to … take myself out of it. When you make a lot of money as a woman, let’s face it, you have power. So how can I take that power and do good with it? How can I amplify someone else? How can I lift up someone else who doesn’t sit in the position of privilege that I sit in?”

Pompeo added that she doesn’t try to control the reaction of others and instead focuses on “using your power for good.”

Backing up value with data is also a lesson Pompeo has learned and encouraged others to do the same.

She explained: “I don’t want anything that I don’t deserve, I don’t want anything that I haven’t worked for. The CAA (Creative Arts Agency) print out a report … and they let you know exactly how you move the needle.

“I see exactly how much Grey’s Anatomy makes for ABC Disney, I get to see the number. Then it’s my face, it’s my voice, I’ve done so much work promoting the show all over the world for the past 20 years …. I have the data to back [it] up. I know the show generated this much money, I definitely deserve a percentage of that.”

“It is challenging for women to advocate for themselves in different disputations and jobs because if you cannot quantity how what you do contributes to the income of that company, it’s harder to fight for yourself and say I deserve this.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

There is now very little room for subtext or doubt. Relations between the U.S. and Russia will include “enormous economic deals” as part of the broader normalization of diplomatic affairs between Moscow and Washington.

That optimistic phrase, turbocharged by the expression “huge upside,” was part of the White House’s summary of Tuesday’s call between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

What started as a suggestion—would U.S. sanctions relief be on the table if Trump helped resolve the war on Ukraine?—is now a megaphone-strength alert. A stable conclusion to hostilities, whether a cease-fire or a more elaborate peace agreement, would bring an end to the Russia’s economic isolation.

To be clear, this move is further off than suggested in a breathy White House readout of the two-hour call between Trump and Putin. And the U.S. is not the only country punishing Russia politically and economically. But this is the clearest statement we have yet on Washington’s intentions. More than a few U.S. companies will take this message and run with it.

The business community began to imagine a world without sanctions on Russia when Trump won the November 2024 elections. He campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine, triggering questions about the longevity of sanctions imposed following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. History shows that sanctions are easy to enact and then notoriously sticky. The U.S. has been sanctioning Cuba since 1962.

But Trump’s campaign pledge is gaining a certain amount of momentum. Talks to end the war began in earnest with a phone call between Trump and Putin in February. Shortly after that, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Riyadh. As they departed the talks, they made a public nod to broader commercial engagement between the two countries.

Each of those moves intensified debate among U.S. companies that left Russia three years ago. Should we go back? Some businesses are having the conversation.

Hundreds of Western companies, including some of the U.S.’s most prominent brands, left Russia following the start of the full-scale invasion. Some left because sanctions made it illegal for them to do business there. Others left because their shareholders, customers, or employees wouldn’t support doing business in or with an aggressor nation. Wide public campaigns to name and shame Western companies in Russia helped focus the minds of executives in the U.S. and around the world.

Tuesday’s Trump-Putin dialogue will intensify deliberations inside U.S. companies. For some of them, sanctions relief is the sole green light they need to go back to Russia. But an end of sanctions is not the end of the discussion. It should be the beginning.

As Tuesday’s call showed, Putin is in no hurry to end the war. His strategic goal remains fully disabling Ukrainian sovereignty. As Trump and Putin negotiate an “unconditional cease-fire,” Putin only adds conditions. These talks will not end soon.

If and when they do, companies thinking of returning to Russia will find a country dramatically different from the one they left. The war on Ukraine has lasted longer than anyone predicted—long enough to see a number of important transformations on the ground in Russia.

Among those changes is the emergence of a new business elite now in possession not only of considerable political favor, but also of several Western assets sold or otherwise “reallocated” away from their former owners. Sure, some U.S. companies inserted buy-back clauses into their exits from Russia, but it is worth questioning the durability of those agreements.

The marketplace has changed, too. While the West was away, companies from non-sanctioning countries came to play. Russian car dealerships once offering sparkling new Volkswagens and Toyotas, among others, are now selling flashy Chinese models.

The law on the ground in Russia has changed, too. Intellectual property law, for example, has been eviscerated. Russian pharmaceutical companies now have government licenses to produce semaglutide injections, in complete contravention to Novo Nordisk’s patents on the drug.

Novo Nordisk is, of course, a Danish company, and relations between Europe and Russia remain hostile. This raises another complication: If the U.S. is determined to lift sanctions but Europe remains, for now, in punishment mode, how will companies navigate an asymmetrical sanctions environment? EU sanctions could, of course tumble too. They depend on periodic, unanimous renewal votes.

Finally, the U.S. business community will want to know whether Trump’s ambitious forecast for normalcy with Russia will include a backstop. Political risk insurance for companies returning to Russia will be astronomically expensive, if it is available at all. Will the White House act as an insurer of last resort, and throw its political weight behind U.S. companies if conditions once again deteriorate?

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Deciding whether or not to have children is a deeply personal choice for any individual, but an increasing resistance to becoming a parent now presents challenges to society as a whole.

The crude birth rate in the U.S. has dropped by more than half since the 1960s. Per the St. Louis Fed, sixty years ago approximately 24 babies were born per 1,000 people, in 2022 that figure stood at 11.

This drop—combined with the fact that the nation’s population is living longer—is a serious concern for economists who question how economies will function with fewer people available to do the work.

Melinda Mills is a professor of demography and population health at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health. Mills explains: “Sustained low fertility combined with longer life expectancy results in aging populations.

“This causes strains in the labor market such as health care for older populations, the closing of schools, rethinking housing and infrastructure, and rethinking pension systems and age of retirement.”

The resulting drop in GDP from this aging population could be as much as 4%, James Pomeroy, HSBC’s global economist, previously told Business Insider.

Are Americans having fewer kids?

Previously experts believed that economies would see a post-COVID “baby bump,” spurred by a brief uptick in births in 2021.

But data from 2022 and 2023 made it clear births were reverting back to their pre-pandemic trend with couples increasingly choosing a dual-income-no-kids (DINK) lifestyle, as the CDC reported last year that in 2023 U.S. fertility rates fell to a historic low of about 55 births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44.

“In a low-fertility scenario, the number of people of the traditional working age could start falling within 20 years,” Pomeroy wrote in his latest note on the subject, though Mills warned the tension between fewer births and an older population is already being felt.

She explained many countries are already struggling to fill health care positions, which previously had relied on migrant workers to fill.

“This has happened in the U.K., for instance where in 2022 around 33% of migrants were to work in the health care system,” Mills, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, told Fortune.

“This has also caused political tensions, with countries increasingly facing choices related to sustaining the labor force and pension systems while also thinking about reskilling or urging existing inactive populations into the labor market.”

For HSBC’s Pomeroy, this will have concrete efforts on people’s daily lives: “You’ll find it more difficult to find somebody to cut your hair, do your nails, set up the X-ray machines at the hospital. The sheer decrease in the number of people…becomes a problem.”

What are millennials having fewer children?

Young people have plenty of reasons not to want kids right now: expensive childcare, an unaffordable housing market, high costs of groceries and household essentials, career disruption, and concerns for the future of the planet.

A Pew Research study from July 2024 spoke to more than 3,000 people who either haven’t had children or don’t plan to.

Of those aged between 18 and 49—who fall predominantly into the Gen Z and millennial generations—who said they didn’t plan on having children, the top reason is simply that they didn’t want to or wanted to focus on other things.

Additionally, 38% said they didn’t want to have children because they were concerned about the state of the world, and 36% said they couldn’t afford to raise a child.

A further 26% said they didn’t want to have children because of environmental concerns and 24% said they wouldn’t have children because they hadn’t found the right partner.

One factor impacting birth rates is also women’s increasing power and influence within the economy.

Mills explains: “The main reasons are manifold, including shifts such women obtaining higher education and remaining in the labor market, work-family reconciliation, but also housing problems, gender equality, and uncertainty for the future.

“The age at first birth is also above 30 in many countries for women and even higher for men at 32 and older. This also causes increasingly biological limits of fertility.”

Couple ask if they can have a career and a baby

Another consideration for many DINK couples is the freedom they can enjoy in their careers if they don’t have the pressure of children to provide for.

Heather Maclean and her husband Scott Kyrish told Fortune in 2023 that the choice not to have children has allowed them to have a “rose and gardener” approach to their careers—the idea that while one person can grow and take risks, the other remains the stable supporter.

“I never thought I’d quit my job to try and write a book. It was never something I saw as an option,” Maclean said.

“But then I took the time to think about what I really wanted to do if I could do anything, and it took a lot of convincing and months of assurances that I could take the time off and afford it, to decide to do it.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Nov. 19, 2024.

More on success:

• Millennials are watching their student loan payments skyrocket under Trump and panicking on TikTok
• Gen Z may not be able to afford a house or the cost of living now—but give it 10 years
• Newly minted millennials and Gen Z now make up 40% of new Ferrari buyers

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com