WOMEN CEOS EARN BIG … BUT FEW OF THEM HAVE THE TOP JOBS
The median pay for a female CEO was US$13.1 million last year, up nine per cent from 2015, according to an analysis by executive data firm Equilar and The Associated Press.
WOMEN CEOs earned big bucks last year, but there are still very few of them running the world’s largest companies.
The median pay for a female CEO was US$13.1 million last year, up nine per cent from 2015, according to an analysis by executive data firm Equilar and The Associated Press. By comparison, male CEOs earned $11.4 million, also up nine per cent.
But the number of women in CEO roles has barely budged. Just six per cent of the top-paid CEOs in the US last year were women, according to the Equilar and AP analysis, a slight increase from about five per cent in 2015 and 2014.
The highest-paid woman was Virginia Rometty of International Business Machines Corp, bumping out Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer from the top spot.
ROMETTY’S EARNINGS
Rometty earned $32.3 million last year from the technology company, a 63 per cent jump from the year before, mainly due to $12.1 million in stock option awards she didn’t receive in 2015.
Mayer earned $27.4 million last year, making her the secondhighest-paid woman. But she may be out of a job after Yahoo Inc completes the sale of its websites and email services to Verizon Communications Inc in June. She’s not expected to join Verizon, and Yahoo has said that Mayer will receive a $23 million severance package if she departs.
Third on the list was Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo Inc, the maker of Mountain Dew soda and Lay’s potato chips. She earned $25.2 million, up 13 per cent from 2015. She was followed by Mary Barra, the CEO of automaker General Motors Co, who earned $22.4 million.
At the bottom of the list was Susan Story of American Water Works Co, the utility company, who earned $4.1 million.
To calculate pay, Equilar added salary, bonus, perks, stock awards, stock option awards, and other types of compensation. Equilar only looked at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index that filed proxy statements with federal regulators between January 1 and May 1, 2017. And it only included CEOs who have been in their roles for at least two years in order to exclude sign-on bonuses. Of the 346 CEOs in that group, just 21 were women.