“The data comes from executive compensation firm Equilar, which looked at companies with market values of $1 billion or more. As the New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller notes, “There are too few women in the Equilar study to make anything of that difference in pay or to come to any definitive conclusions about gender and pay at the C.E.O. level.”
But the finding follows a pattern. Last year a Bloomberg News analysis of the highest paid executives at S&P 500 companies found that the women on the list made 18 percent less than male counterparts. And it wasn’t just their small numbers, ether: 8 percent of the top five compensated executives were women, but they also made less compared to others in their industries. Campell Soup CEO Denise Morrison, for example, made 24 percent less than the average for CEOs in the food industry. Pharmaceutical company Mylan CEO Heather Bresch made 33 percent less than the average in her sector. Another study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that female CEOs made less than 80 percent of what male ones earned in 2013.”