Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that the average American woman makes 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. And that gap is tenacious, affecting women even as they climb to the very top of the corporate ranks: Women account for only 17 of the 200 CEOs in Bloomberg’s Pay Index, which ranks the highest-paid executives.
There does, however, appear to be an exception.
According to professional services firm Thelander Consulting’s 2016 Private Company Compensation Report—which gathered data on 978 private companies—median base pay for male and female biotech CEOs was identical in 2016 (155 men and 19 women were included in the analysis, says Jody Thelander, the company’s president and CEO).
Thelander looked at CEOs in four sectors: Biotech, clean tech, medical devices and other tech. Overall, they found an average CEO pay gap of $25,000 between men and women. The largest wage differential was among medical device CEOs, where the male chiefs out-earn their female counterparts by an average $34,500. Biotech was the only industry where the researchers did not find a gender gap.
What differentiates biotech from the rest of Silicon Valley? “It is almost impossible to be a biotech CEO unless you have advanced education,” says Thelander. “In biotech, [men and women] have the same training, the same exposure…so they start to get to a same level of skill,” she says. “Education is the great equalizer.”
Yet while she may be on to something, a look at the biotech CEOs backgrounds reveals an interesting trend: Women in the industry are actually more educated than men. According to industry database PitchBook, which Thelander worked with on the study, 88.8% of female CEOs in biotech have a master’s degree or higher, compared to 84.7% of men, while 51% of female biotech CEOs hold a PhD degree or higher, compared to 36% of men. So, while education may play a role in closing the CEO pay gap, it appears that in order to be equal, women must actually go above and beyond.
By Valentina Zarya
Source: Fortune
At a time of shrinking DEI commitments and growing cynicism around corporate culture, Toni Thompson is paying close attention to what Etsy’s increasingly diverse and growing number of employees need to succeed. Since she joined Etsy in 2020, the company has expanded dramatically, transforming into a ‘house of brands’ with offices in Brooklyn, Chicago, London, Dublin, and Mexico City
Job swapping and job hopping, once viewed negatively, can now be a strategic move to advance the careers of Black professionals, offering an alternative and unconventional way for workers to control their own stability and boost earnings in a relatively short period of time.
During a women’s development program I once facilitated, a participant stood up to share her experience: “Nellie, one of my colleagues told me that I got promoted simply because I am a woman.” Her discomfort and disappointment were visible, and I could see by the expressions of others in the room that this was a familiar scenario. No surprise.
