Women-Led Firms and the Gender Gap in Top Executive Jobs *Using data on Executive Compensation from Standard and Poor's ExecuComp, this paper explores the gender gap in top executive jobs and the effect of women CEOs, Chairs, and Directors on the pay of other women executives. The results show a narrowing of the uncorrected gender pay gap from the mid-1990s. Women top executives earn between 8% to 25% less than male executives after controlling for differences in company size, occupational title, and industry. The magnitude of the gender pay gap is statistically related to the gender of the Chief Executive and Corporate Board Chair. Women CEO and Board Chairs bring more top women and at higher pay than is found in non-women-led firms. Specifically, female executives in women-led firms earn between 10-20% more than comparable executive women in male-led firms and are between 3-18% more likely to be among the highest five paid executives in these firms as well. The paper thereby provides strong empirical evidence that women leaders are associated with positive outcomes for women executives in substantive and important ways.JEL Classification: J11, J16, J33, J70, J71, J78Keywords: executive compensation, gender discrimination, labor market institutions Brass 1985, Ibarra 1992, Lincoln and Miller 1979. Second, as women advance through ranks, differences in the treatment of men and women that arise from imperfect information about women's abilities, as in "statistical discrimination" models (Phelps 1972, Aigner and Cane 1977) and "pollution" models of discrimination (Goldin 2002), will narrow as more and better individual specific information is obtained. Third, advancement of women may occur through mentoring which may pull women faster into organizational hierarchies, give women better access to job-specific human capital, and thereby increase their productivity and marketability, and the more-so the more senior are the women (Catalyst 1996, 2004, Preston 2004 The best case therefore for estimating gender differences independent of quality is the case of workers with similar education, skills, and motivation. In this paper, I make My results strongly support the view that women executives fare better in women-led firms. Specifically, women-executives working in women-led firms earn between 15-20% more in total compensation than women working in other firms after correcting for important executive, firm, and industry characteristics that might affect the magnitude of this relationship, and this effect appears even stronger in a sub-sample of women only using fixed-effects estimation methods. In addition, women-led firms have statistically significantly greater numbers of top women executives, suggesting that women-leaders help to bring women into the highest ranks of the firm. Firms with a relatively high representation of women Board members are also associated with positive outcomes for women executives.Taken together, these findings support the contention that women leaders are instrumental to the su...
