As the number of female CEOs rises across publicly traded companies, researchers looked to uncover gender pay gaps for top executives, but a recent study revealed no reliable evidence for compensation disparities between male and female CEOs, according to a paper to be published in Strategic Management Journal.
The gender pay gap among a company's top executives, which would typically posit men having higher compensation than women, was put into question after a 2015 study found female CEOs receive greater compensation than men. Researchers for the more recent study followed and expanded data methods from this previous study to investigate whether women CEOs are significantly higher compensated than their male counterparts.
"The present study reexamines [the previous study's] finding of gender differences in CEO compensation by extending the analysis further in time (that is, up to 2014), using a larger sample and more rigorous empirical analyses," the study authors wrote.
The researchers examined data from 1996 to 2014, which covers over 2,000 unique companies and 105 unique firms led by female CEOs. The researchers analyzed total CEO compensation from ExecuComp, which consisted of salary, bonus, total value of restricted stocks granted, total value of stock options granted, long-term incentive payouts and all other annual compensation.
Although the fact that women constitute approximately 5 percent of CEOs in U.S. public companies would suggest potential discrimination against female CEOs, the researchers found the previous study's claims about the pay disparity in CEO compensation favoring women over men "may be premature."
While the authors said their model accounted for the increase over time for CEOs and the number of women in the role, "we cannot confidently infer that compensation of male and female CEOs differ," they wrote. "Our sequenced reexamination fails to find reliable evidence to support [the previous study's] conclusion that women CEOs receive higher compensation than male CEOs."
The finding on the lack of a gender gap in CEO compensation also contradicts common wisdom that women earn less than their male peers while working in the same roles, the study authors noted.
"Future research aimed at expanding our research to other executive roles (e.g., CFO or COO), and to other samples, types of firms or societies, will further extend the knowledge frontier about gender pay gap in the C-suite," the authors concluded.