At the top
Female CEOs such as Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer outearned their male counterparts last year, but their ranks remain small.
For the second year in a row, female CEOs earned more than their male counterparts and received bigger raises. But only a small sliver of the largest companies are run by women, and experts say gender parity at the top remains way off.
The median pay for a female CEO was nearly $18 million last year, up about 13 percent from 2014. By comparison, male CEOs’ median pay was $10.5 million, up 3 percent from a year earlier, according to an analysis by executive compensation data firm Equilar and The Associated Press.
A pay hike doesn’t tell the full story, though.
The jump is largely due to the small sample size: Only 17 of the 341 CEOs analyzed by Equilar and the AP were women. That means any one CEO’s compensation — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s nearly $36 million package, for example, or Mary Dillon’s 200 percent raise at Ulta — can skew the results.
Of the 10 highest-paid CEOs on the list, only one was a woman: Yahoo’s Mayer, whose position is in jeopardy amid questions about the company’s future.
The next highest-paid woman was Indra Nooyi, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Inc., who earned $22.2 million. General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic came in third at $20.4 million. The lowestpaid female CEO on the list was Lauralee Martin of HCP, a health care real estate investment trust, whose pay package was valued at $800,000.
The only black woman to make the list — Ursula Burns of Xerox — is giving up her CEO role soon to serve as chairman of the document technology company after the business splits in two.