Gender and executive pay in the S&P Mid-Cap and Small-Cap companies

Abstract

Gender pay equity among all levels of workers is a topic of interest to the public as well as to business researchers. Catalyst, a non-profit group devoted to the advancement of women in management, noted that women executives were paid only 68% of the earnings of their male counterparts in 1997. In this current study of the S&P Mid-Cap and Small-Cap companies, we find that variations in annual and long-term executive pay are generally not associated with gender, but rather with the size of the company, CEO pay (a control for pay-scale strategy), and whether the executive is in a line position. While women appear to be earnings equal amounts of total remuneration in these smaller companies, it should be noted that only 3.6% of the S&P Mid-Cap and Small-Cap five top-paid executives were female in 1998.