The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs

Marianne Bertrand and Kevin Hallock

ILR Review, 2001, vol. 55, issue 1, 3-21

Abstract: Using the ExecuComp data set, which contains information on the five highest-paid executives in each of a large number of U.S. firms for the years 1992–97, the authors examine the gender compensation gap among high-level executives. Women, who represented about 2.5% of the sample, earned about 45% less than men. As much as 75% of this gap can be explained by the fact that women managed smaller companies and were less likely to be CEO, Chair, or company President. The unexplained gap falls to less than 5% with an allowance for the younger average age and lower average seniority of the female executives. These results do not rule out the possibility of discrimination via gender segregation or unequal promotion. Between 1992 and 1997, however, women nearly tripled their participation in the top executive ranks and also strongly improved their relative compensation, mostly by gaining representation in larger corporations.

Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (373)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001979390105500101 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs (2000)
Working Paper: The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs (1999)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:55:y:2001:i:1:p:3-21

DOI: 10.1177/001979390105500101

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().