September 25, 2018; NYN Media
The new GuideStar compensation report is out, and unfortunately there are no astounding results. Much of the executive analysis is based on the pay of those in the CEO position, and particularly on the pay differentials between women and men in those lead positions. Chuck McLean, who put the reports together until this year, kept that focus alive at GuideStar for many years, and this year’s report does not break from that tradition.
As always, the gender gap in terms of pay and in terms of number of women occupying those positions is larger at the higher-end organizations. There has, however, been some incremental progress on narrowing the gap. Indeed, we see that between 2015 and 2016, women received slightly larger increases than men. That is, until you get to the top two tiers of organizations—those with budgets over $25 million. Then, the trend reverses.
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As readers may remember, the pattern has been that women dominate as CEOs in lower-budget nonprofits but are far scarcer at high-budget organizations. The pay differential has also tended to be greater in these high-budget organizations. This pattern remains in place: The proportion of female CEOs in the top two budget categories has increased over the past 11 years, but between 2015 and 2016, there was virtually no change. Furthermore, the gender pay gap is highest among the largest three tiers of nonprofits, those with budgets of $10 million or more. And, in the very top tier, those with budgets of $50 million and up, the gap is a full 20 percent—and here, GuideStar found, was where the highest CEO pay increases occurred.
In that top budget band, by the way, , the problem of pay disparity is unlikely to go away very soon, since the report finds that women CEOs saw pay increases of 4.9 percent while men saw increases of 8.4 percent.
In the smallest budget category, we actually saw median pay decrease, but that is attributed to having a larger number of returns to study with the inclusion of 990-EZ forms.—Ruth McCambridge
