Women outearn men as CEOs?

The gender pay gap has shown up in seemingly every job there is: tech workers. Scientists. Even male nurses make more than their female peers.

But in one occupation — one at the very tiptop of corporate America — the median woman has consistently earned more than the median man. It’s the corner office of the country’s largest public companies: chief executives of S&P 500 corporations.

A new analysis of the largest public U.S. companies by the Associated Press and Equilar, the executive pay and corporate governance research firm, found that the median female CEO made $13.1 million in 2016, compared with $11.4 million for the median male CEO.

“I don’t think there’s any one definitive reason we can say this is happening,” said Dan Marcec, Equilar’s director of content. “It could just be a matter that these individuals happen to be running some of the more wellperforming companies, and that’s reflected in their compensation.”

Among the 25 highest paid CEOs in 2016, according to the AP/Equilar study, five of them were women, an over-representation when women make up less than 6 percent of all CEOs in the S&P 500, according to the nonprofit group Catalyst. (The AP/ Equilar study looked at the 346 CEOs in the S&P 500 that have been in the job for at least two fiscal years. Twenty-one of them are women, and 325 are men.)

So why, at least at the median, have female CEOs consistently made more than men?

There are plenty of theories but not a clear explanation.

One possibility might be sample size, because there are so many fewer women than men in the job. But because these analyses look at median pay, rather than averages, an outlier shouldn’t sway the figures substantially, said Eric Hoffmann, a vice president of Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting firm. The small numbers, however, could lead to more volatility from one year to the next in what female CEOs make.

Rather, he thinks the most likely explanation is company size, as there is a distinct correlation between annual revenue and executive pay, and many of these women run larger companies.