Ellen Pompeo couldn’t help but feel “salty” about the pay gap between her and her Grey’s Anatomy costar Patrick Dempsey.

The actress recently recalled that Dempsey was paid more than she was because he was a much bigger name and had previous experience filming TV pilots when their hit series premiered.

“Back in those days — I don’t know if they still do this or not — you had a quote. And with every TV pilot you did, you got your quote,” Pompeo said during a recent interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “So if you’ve done 13 TV pilots and… nothing personal to him but, just in general, only a man … can have 13 failed TV pilots, and their quote still keeps going up, right?”

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Pompeo acknowledged that, in Dempsey’s defense, Grey’s was her first-ever television pilot and that “no one knew who I was at the time,” adding, “Everybody knew who he was. So he did deserve that money. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve that money.”

Still, it stung that she was headlining the medical drama and getting paid less than her male costar. “It just… being that I was the namesake of the show, I deserved the same, and then that was harder to get,” Pompeo clarified. “So I wasn’t salty about him getting what he got. I was salty that they didn’t value me as much as they valued him. And they never will.”

That’s why the actress, who has starred on Grey’s for almost 20 years, says it’s pivotal for women to advocate for themselves and others in the workplace when they reach a certain point in their career. 

“If you know that you’re getting this much and all the other women are well beneath you, you can’t just be okay with that. You can’t just be like, ‘Yes. I’m winning. Cool. Let’s go,'” she said. “You really do have a responsibility to look and see what everybody else is making and use your power to say, ‘Listen, I appreciate what I got. This is amazing, but I happen to notice this. And I really think that all the women deserve a bump.’” 

Pompeo also emphasized the importance of having the necessary data at your disposal to prove that you deserve a pay raise.

“I see exactly how much Grey’s Anatomy makes for ABC Disney,” she said. “I get to see the number. 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 am the Disney princess of that franchise,” she said. “So I have this data to back it up. I know the show has generated this much money. I definitely deserve a percentage of that, and you can do the same.”

Pompeo has starred as Dr. Meredith Grey in more than 400 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, which began airing in 2005. Dempsey, who played her character’s on-again, off-again love interest Dr. Derek Shepherd (a.k.a. McDreamy), starred on the series for its first 11 seasons before exiting the show in 2015. He later returned in one of Meredith’s dream sequences in season 17. 

Watch Pompeo discuss the stars’ pay gap in the podcast above.