Gender Pay Gap Even Wider at the Very Top of Corporate America

Corporate America pays its top female executives 68 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues, according to the first study comparing compensation of the highest-paid women and men in Fortune 500 companies.

In fact, the pay gap in corporate America is wider than in the U.S. work force as a whole, where women earned 76.7 cents for every dollar men made in the third quarter of 1998, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“This is a national problem that cuts across the whole economy,” said Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, a New York-based women’s research group that conducted the study. “Corporations are no worse than every other part of the American economy.”

“It’s hard enough getting up there, and when you do, you don’t even get paid as much,” said Joyce P. Jacobsen, a Wesleyan University professor of economics who specializes in gender economics.

That the wage gap endured at the highest pay levels surprised Jacobsen and other researchers who had assumed the executive suite was one place where women would be collecting equal paychecks.

This year, for the first time, Catalyst studied executive compensation as part of its annual census of women in the top ranks of major corporations.

Overall, the census showed that women accounted for 11.2% of all corporate officers, up from 10.6% last year. For the first time, more than half the companies had two or more female corporate officers.

In comparing executive compensation, Catalyst combined salary and bonuses, but did not consider stock options--an increasingly lucrative part of executive compensation packages--because disclosure standards for the options vary too widely.

Researchers obtained the compensation of top corporate officers--who hold titles such as chief executive officer, chief operating officer and senior vice president--from 1997 proxy statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

When Catalyst excluded the only two women CEOs in the Fortune 500 list--Jill Barad of Mattel Inc. and Marion Sandler of Golden West Financial Corp.--the executive gap was reduced nine cents to 77 cents, almost identical to the Labor Department’s comparative statistics for men and women at all levels.

Catalyst researchers said their comparisons showed that women were being paid less than men for the same work. For example, female executive vice presidents earned 82 cents for every dollar made by men with the same title; female chief financial officers made 77 cents for every dollar earned by male CFOs.

Catalyst, which works to advance women in business, cited a list of possible causes for the executive pay gap.

Among them: resentment against successful women; an assertion that women executives don’t negotiate their compensation as shrewdly or as toughly as men; and a sentiment among some top bosses “that women just don’t need the money so they shouldn’t be paid like men.”

Naomi Lopez, a director at the Pacific Research Institute, a self-described free-market think tank in San Francisco, discounted the Catalyst study, calling it “only a small snapshot of the bigger picture.”

Other studies have shown that women are increasingly leaving corporate America to start their own businesses, “so when you have a diminishing pool of women, the numbers are obviously going to be skewed,” Lopez said.

In Catalyst’s study, the median total compensation of women in the study was $518,596, compared to $765,000 for men. Median means half earned more and half less.

Compensation for top-earning women executives ranged from $210,001 to $4,094,040, compared to the range for men of $220,660 to $31,293,750.