A recent Morningstar study of Named Executive Officer pay at S&P 500 companies found that following the onset of the pandemic, female C-suite pay as a percentage of pay earned by their male peers fell to its lowest point since 2012.
Other findings include:
- On average, women in C-suite roles earned $0.75 for every $1 paid to men. In 2018, it was $0.88 to $1.
- While the number of women in the C-suite has inched up, progress remains painfully slow. At the current rate, women and men will not be equally likely to fill executive positions until 2060.
- 56% of S&P 500 companies have a female NEO, but only 16% have two or more female NEOs.
- The primary driver of the gap is equity grants. Of the 18 executives that earned more than $50 million, only one was a woman.
- From 2012–2020, C-suite pay overall rose by 24%. But when broken down by gender, there was a 27% increase for men versus a 10% increase for women.
The results of the survey may reflect that the C-suite position most likely to be occupied by a woman, the Chief Human Resources Officer, is also often the lowest paid position in the C-suite. This, in turn, may reflect the well-established phenomenon of pay dropping in a given field once women enter that field in higher numbers. However, there are some elements of the data that are not addressed. For example, the report does not detail if some of the largest outliers for 2020 are included, so there may be some skewing of the data that will reverse itself post-pandemic. Either way, this is a development that will likely be referenced by pay equity activists to show that the pay gap persists even at the highest levels in a company.
