During the Oscars earlier this year, Patricia Arquette rallied women and later raised some haunches when she discussed up wage inequality. During her acceptance speech, for Best Supporting Actress for Boyhood, she made the rather awesome to-the-point observation that “we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights, it’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” Unfortunately she expounded backstage on the “fought for everybody else’s rights” part of that statement.

In the press conference following her win, Arquette called out LGBT activists and minority rights groups to join the cause, as if they were not involved in women’s issues to date. “It’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.” She later used Twitter to double down on those comments, suggesting that she was definitely calling out activists for other causes.

In other interviews discussing the wage gap, Arquette made a lot of excellent, valid points about how lower pay for women affects families, children, and opportunities. She didn’t address the fact that she had called out other activist groups, though. That changed in a recent guest column she did for The Hollywood Reporter. Arquette admitted she was wrong about other activists not supporting feminism and she apologized. It took a while, but given how thoughtful she is I assume that she was trying to figure out how she felt about her blunder and come up with the best way to approach it.

I knew that pay inequality was a risky thing to bring up at the Oscars. There is an unspoken understanding that you shouldn’t be political on that stage. But the truth is, I don’t think women can wait anymore. We have to be political. I don’t think we can continue to be left out of the conversation.

I blame myself for my stupid wording that night when I was calling for male activists to have our backs and remember women, to support the women’s movement and to include women in the conversation. I was talking about the really devastating consequences of the women’s movement stalling out. It was my own lack of clarity backstage that made some women feel left out or slighted. This of all things makes me sad, because they are my heroes.

Since the speech, I have learned a lot more about the feminist movement and how women of color have been left out of the process. I understand that more now. I am really sad that I may have added to their feeling of being excluded.

Some people said that women are paid the same as men. Which is not true. Some people thought I was asking for actresses, or even white actresses, to be paid more. When I brought it up, I was talking about all women. I meant Native American women, Asian women, Latino women, African-American women, trans women, lesbian women, white women.

People like to talk about the Sony hack and the pay gap facing actresses, and yes, that happens in this industry. But what the Sony hack also revealed that nobody is talking about is that there is a pay gap in the sound department, in mixing, in editing and on and on. If it wasn’t Sony that was hacked but instead it was another nonindustry corporation, we would have seen the same gender pay bias play out.

It was never about only actresses or white women to me. The reality is that the gender pay gap exists in 98 percent of the world’s professions, and it gets worse the more education you have. Wage disparity costs the average woman $400,000 and robs women with higher education of $2 million over their lifetime. You have a girl taking out the same college loan as her male counterpart in her class. But she will take years longer to pay off her student loan. It will take her longer to buy a house. She will have less money in her retirement account and be more likely to be poor when she’s elderly. Her kids will be affected.

The issue of pay inequality is really important because experts say it will take 40 years for that gap to close. (Editor’s note: The “Global Gender Gap Report” released Nov. 19 calculated it will take 118 years.) We don’t have 40 years to wait. We are not in an Ozzie and Harriet world anymore.

We need to make a radical, unnatural readjustment. We need really strong pay laws like the measure Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson recently passed in California that will better protect women against unfair pay practices. I’m so happy this conversation is happening, but we need to remain strong and make sure our leaders don’t forget women as the conversation continues.

I knew before getting up onstage that the issue of equal pay is what I would talk about. It only took a couple of minutes to write the speech — I wrote it while they were putting on my makeup. A friend of mine, Kamala Lopez, had been working on this documentary titled Equal Means Equal, about the Equal Rights Amendment and equal pay, child trafficking, spousal abuse and many other issues that predominantly affect women. So I had been learning a lot about these topics and thinking a lot about my character in Boyhood. She had to move her kids multiple times, and she put herself through school. Her life — their lives — would have been different had she earned a full dollar.

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Arquette goes on to explain that the wage gap unduly affects single mothers, and by extension their children, often living in poverty. Unequal pay makes it harder for abused women to escape violent relationships, and it especially affects African American and Latina women, who are statistically paid less than white women. Arquette also said that men need to support women’s causes, because “When men support change, it has been shown that change comes 10 times faster. We need our sons, brothers, friends, lovers, husbands, uncles, grandpas, co-workers and heroes.” I don’t know if that number is accurate but it’s true that people in power can effect greater change, and men are typically in power. I like that Arquette is continuing to talk about this, that she’s revised her stance, and that she is not backing down. We need more celebrities to discuss the facts behind feminism, to not be afraid to lay out both the true meaning of the movement and the way that so many people’s lives are affected when feminism loses ground. And feminism does lose ground when celebrities act like it’s a dirty word.