Female CFOs Paid 16% Less Than Their Male Counterparts

Studies Show

Female CFOs Paid 16% Less Than Their Male Counterparts

2:00 pm, April 4th | by Amy Tennery

You’ll have to excuse us if we were less than shocked to learn yesterday that there’s still a huge pay gap between men’s and women’s NCAA basketball team coaches. It’s not that we’re not fans of the NCAA — it’s just that, well, our hopes weren’t particularly high in the first place.

But a new study on pay among male and female CFOs has us genuinely perplexed.

Turns out that male chief financial officers at public U.S. firms earn (on average) 16.3 percent more than their female counterparts, according to a new study from GMI Ratings. Even more surprisingly, GMI actually built a model to predict CFO gender. I’ll allow them to explain:

“[We] found that even after controlling for variables like company size, tenure and board memberships, CFO compensation was predictive of CFO gender. We then built a model to estimate the pay differential between male and female CFOs.”

So it’s safe to say the divide is somewhat pronounced.

While the gender pay gap is nothing new, this is somewhat unusual given women’s ascendency in another ‘chief’ role: Chief Information Officer. In fact, as a report earlier this year showed, five of the top to highest-paid CIOs at Fortune 500 companies are women.

[via Globe and Mail]

TAGS: female cfos paid less | gender pay gap cfos