Gender Pay Gap Found at Highest Corporate Levels

The persistent pay gap between women and men extends to the highest levels of corporate America, according to a new study, with women executives on average earning only two-thirds as much as their male counterparts at the nation’s largest companies.

Still, women have made great strides in top corporations during the last 10 years, the study by the Korn/Ferry International executive search firm and UCLA’s John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management found--although a majority say they have confronted sexism or sexual harassment along the way.

Many of those surveyed predicted that they would reach parity with men in the coming decade. What’s more, women executives who 10 years ago were sacrificing family for career now more commonly are combining the two, albeit with considerable stress, the study concluded.

“There’s still a glass ceiling there, and no one is suggesting that it’s gone,” said Richard M. Ferry, chairman and chief executive of the search firm. “But it certainly is moving up.”

The findings echo Census Department figures showing that women earn 70 cents for every dollar earned by men--69 cents per dollar in California.

Korn/Ferry and UCLA surveyed 400 women of vice president rank or higher at the nation’s 1,000 biggest industrial firms and 500 largest service companies. The authors compared the findings to those of two earlier studies: a 1982 Korn/Ferry-UCLA survey of female executives and their 1989 survey of male executives.

Women executives’ salaries doubled over the decade to an average of $187,000. But that still lagged the average $289,000 reported by the male executives. Women and men both reported working an average of 56 hours a week.

Part of the salary disparity can be explained by the age difference between the average female and male executive--44 years old for women, versus 52 for men in the earlier study. Also, more of the women are at the lower-paying vice president level. Men outnumbered women as executive vice presidents by nearly 3 to 1.

Those factors are significant, said Laurence M. Levin, an assistant professor of economics at Santa Clara University and co-author of a study on the earnings women lose when they take breaks from their careers to do such things as rearing children.

Still, Levin--like other analysts--attributes a portion of the pay difference to gender. “I believe there’s still discrimination,” he said, “and I think that does explain some of it.”

Added the study’s authors: “Unequal pay is still a fact.”

Just over 27% of the women surveyed found sexism a roadblock to their careers, down from the 39.1% who pointed to sexism in 1982. More than 58% said they had faced sexual harassment, although most ignored it or confronted the harasser privately.

The number of women who said they were executive vice presidents more than doubled to nearly 9% from 4% over the 10-year period. Those at the senior vice president level increased to 23% from 13%.

The statistics “paint a picture of upward movement for women over the past decade,” the study says.

About 69% of the senior women executives in the new survey are married; almost 6 in 10 have children. In the 1982 survey, only 49% of women executives said they were married, and 6 in 10 were childless. By comparison, 9 out of 10 male executives surveyed in 1989 said they were married, and 91% had children.

Still, juggling family and work obligations has taken its toll on the women executives, the study says, citing a finding that 77% of the women wanted to retire before the age of 65, compared with 30% of their male counterparts.

Although most of the women were satisfied with their careers, nearly every woman surveyed--96.4%--said the pace of progress for women in corporate America was too slow.

A factor holding women back, the study found, was that men currently holding positions of power within corporations still do not feel comfortable with women as peers. “Comfort level,” as the survey calls it, is an important factor in selecting executives for the most senior positions.

In other words, “ultimate power still rests in the old boys club,” said Dr. Carol Scott, acting dean of the UCLA graduate management school.

Indeed, Mary Mattis, vice president for research at Catalyst, a business consulting and research group, cautioned that the survey did not indicate that women have achieved parity with men.

“People could read the study and say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotten over that problem,’ but we haven’t,” Mattis said. “Women are frustrated, and companies are hemorrhaging female talent because of it.”

A separate study of Fortune 1000 companies, also released Tuesday, found that women are slowly gaining entry into America’s corporate boardrooms but that minority groups still have few representatives on boards of directors.

The report by Heidrick & Struggles--another executive search firm--said women occupy 6.3% of of the 9,707 corporate board seats in the United States, up 35% from five years ago. But minority men and women hold only 3.3% of the seats.

Times wire services contributed to this story.