Jaye Jacobs thinks her career has been "affected by being a woman of colour".
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The 38-year-old actress - who plays Donna Jackson in 'Holby City' - believes that her career has been undermined by prejudice, but she also thinks the landscape is beginning to change.
She shared: "Without doubt, my career has been totally affected by being a woman of colour … when I started out, even if it wasn't verbalised, I knew I'd be auditioning for the only black or dual heritage character to appear in whichever show I was up for. That seems to be changing now.
"As young women we were subconsciously conditioned to behave in a certain way to impress our male superiors. We just didn't realise it."
Meanwhile, Gabriella Leon - who plays Jade Lovall in 'Casualty' - has admitted to often feeling underestimated as a deaf woman in the TV business.
She told the Digital Spy magazine: "I think women can sometimes be underestimated in this industry.
"There are times where I have felt underestimated in the past, and, being a deaf woman, this has definitely added challenges as to how I've been perceived and treated. The joy in being underestimated is proving people wrong and showing up for yourself."
Gabriella also thinks it's important that the TV industry tries to steer clear of tokenism.
She said: "As an industry, we have to be careful of tokenism. We should steer far, far away from it.
"There's no point in having strong female leads if the point of having the character is just to show, 'Oh look it's a strong female lead' and ticking boxes - we should just have strong female leads with their own juicy, complicated narratives because that's what we want to see."
The full soap star interviews can be read in issue seven of Digital Spy magazine, available now exclusively on Apple News+