Patricia Arquette Says Her Oscar Speech Was Meant To Be Inclusive Of 'All Women'

The actress says she was "really sad about" minority women feeling excluded from her acceptance speech.

Earlier this year, when she won an Oscar for 2014's "Boyhood," Patricia Arquette used her acceptance speech to make an impassioned plea for female wage equality. But critics pounced on her language, claiming she failed to specifically address minority groups -- a response Arquette says deeply affected her.

The critically-lauded actress told HuffPost Live on Thursday that her speech was meant to include all women, and she regrets any misunderstanding about that. She explained:

Some people assumed I was talking about white women, which I never was -- I was talking about all women -- and that I was talking about actresses, which I never was. We did know about the Sony hack because of Jennifer Lawrence, but we would know about gender pay inequality on any company that got hacked because it's in 98 percent of all companies. But I felt really sad about it, because also I think some women didn't feel like I heard them or respected them and honestly, they're like my greatest heroes, so it really made me feel sad about that.

Arquette is unsatisfied with the progress of gender equality, she affirmed, and she said her attention was simply to call attention to that.

"Basically what I was saying is I don't know why women are never a part of the conversation," the "CSI: Cyber" actress recounted. "The women's movement hasn't moved at all. ... We don't talk about women at all. They're the invisible part of our whole nation, so I was appealing to our great activist leaders to help women, to remember us, to lend their hand, and maybe that's not my place to say."

Watch more from Patricia Arquette's HuffPost Live conversation here.

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