Bull

September 16, 2013; GuideStar

 

GuideStar has just released another nonprofit compensation report, which you can peruse here at leisure and share with your board. But the biggest news in it is the fact that, again, women executives are still being underpaid relative to their male counterparts at similar organizations of similar sizes. Specifically, the gap ranged from 9 percent for CEOs at organizations with budgets of $250,000 or less to 21 percent at organizations with budgets between $5 million and $10 million.

About the only good news you can find in this report for women leaders is that across all sizes of organization, the percentage of women in the CEO role has increased. But though women now comprise the majority of CEOs at organizations at the lower end of the budget scale, as pay levels rise with the annual budgets of the organization, the proportions of women holding CEO positions head markedly downhill.

Budget size

Proportion of CEOs that are women

<$250K

57%

$250 – $500K

55%

$500K – $1M       

52%

$1M – $2.5M

45%

$2.5M – $5M

38%

$5M – $10M       

33%

$10M – $25M

29%

$25M – $50M

23%

>$50M

16%

So, as Chuck McLean, the author of the report, comments, “More women now occupy CEO positions than men and they are being paid at a lower rate than men in them.” He said that no real statistically significant progress has been consistently made as far as the gender pay gap is concerned.—Ruth McCambridge