The Gender Gap in Executive Compensation

Taekjin Shin

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2012, vol. 639, issue 1, 258-278

Abstract: While many studies have explored the issue of women’s representation among top management, little is known about the gender gap in compensation among those who reached the top. Using data on 7,711 executives at 831 U.S. firms, this study investigates social-psychological factors that explain the gender gap in executive compensation. Consistent with theories on social identity and demographic similarity effects, the gender gap in executive pay is smaller when a greater number of women sit on the compensation committee of the board, which is the group responsible for setting executive compensation. However, the presence of a female chief executive officer (CEO) is not associated with the compensation of female non-CEO executives working under the female boss. The findings highlight the need to study women’s representation on corporate boards.

Keywords: gender; executive compensation; board of directors; compensation committee; chief executive officer; CEO (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716211421119 (text/html)

Related works:
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:anname:v:639:y:2012:i:1:p:258-278

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211421119

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().