Women continue to be scarce among highest paid executive officers

According to the latest report by the InterOrganization Network (ION) on the status of women directors and executive officers of public companies, women continue to be underrepresented in top compensated positions. Seventy two percent of 1,161 companies in nine of the 10 U.S. regions tracked by ION had no women among their top-compensated executive positions.
The report also revealed that the number of companies without women in the top compensated executive officer ranks exceeded the number of companies with no women executive officers, evidence that even at the highest levels of corporate leadership, the highest paying positions are still primarily filled by men. In addition, the ION report also indicated that there has been little progress in electing women to the boards of the largest US public companies, despite the fact that there are more women that ever before in the US labor force. Few companies had enough women and minorities on their boards to truly reap the financial and cultural benefits that true workplace diversity can bring to a company.
Part of the reason why there are so few women in high paying executive positions in the US can be attributed to the fact that women in general entered the US workforce in prominence later than men, and they also leave and reenter the workforce with much more frequency than men, as a result of childbirth and family responsibilities.
But despite the fact that those two factors have exerted an overwhelming influence on the reasons why women in top executive positions are virtually nonexistent, we can do nothing to change them. We cannot change the past or make it so that women enter the US workforce a hundred years earlier. And we certainly can’t stop women from doing what they and they only can do (bearing children, in case you were wondering). Even if we quadrupled the amount of qualified nannies in the US, my guess is that the majority of women would still take time off when they give birth, and the percent of women actually leaving the workplace to raise children would decrease marginally at best.
What we can change is the compensation structures of women in the executive suite, but in order to do that, we must first determine what they are being paid in relation to men at the same level. If men of equal stature are being paid more than their female counterparts, there must be a reason.
My guess is that if this is happening, the reason is more subjective than objective. Think about it, if a woman has worked her way to a certain executive position on the same track, timeline, and experience as her male counterpart, there can really be no objective reason why she should earn less. But the problem with reports like the ION report is that they barely scratch the surface of the issue at hand, and they usually are mistaken in some way.
When a report examines reported salaries (and bear in mind that I don’t know the methodology used in compiling the report), all the researchers see is numbers, and not the reasons why those numbers are there. And even then, when experience is added to the equation, you don’t get a complete picture as to why an E-level woman is making less than a man with equal experience. Everyone has different experiences in their careers that shape the direction of their careers and subsequent salaries for better or worse.
More research needs to be done on the e-level pay gap between men and women if only to be sure that existing research truly compares apples to apples, rather than to oranges.