Female CEOs are outearning their male counterparts, according to a study by Equilar and the Associated Press. Despite this financial win, the number of women at the helm of companies is still disproportionately small compared to men.
The study examined 2023 CEO compensation for the S&P 500, or the 500 largest publicly traded companies. It focused only on CEOs who had held positions for at least two fiscal years and whose firms filed proxy statements between January 1 and April 30, 2024. These criteria narrowed the sample from 500 to 341 CEOs, of which 25 were women.
They found that women’s median pay exceeded men’s by more than 8%. For female CEOs, the median compensation was $17.6 million, whereas for male CEOs, the median was $16.3 million. This result is surprising because women generally take home only about 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man.