Women still aren't making it to the top of the ladder.
Male chief financial officers in the U.S. get paid 16 percent more on average than their female counterparts, according to a report by GMI Ratings. In total compensation, female CFOs earn $1.35 million per year on average, compared to $1.56 million per year for male CFOs, according to the study.
The female CFO at the middle of the pay ladder would see a 25.5 percent pay increase if she were male, according to the study. And there are far more male CFOs than female CFOs. Just 8 percent of the CFOs in the study were women.
The large gender discrepancy in CFO pay rates could be the result of glaring pay differences in a variety of industries. Indeed, the gender pay gap is wider in the financial sector than in any other area of the economy, according to the U.S. Census. And female lobbyist CEOs earn 43 percent less than male lobbyist CEOs, according to Bloomberg News.
Though the gender wage gap for CFOs is pretty wide, it's narrower than the pay gap for average workers. Women in the U.S. were paid 19 percent less than men in 2010, according to the Labor Department. The GMI Ratings study found that female CFOs on average are paid 14 percent less than male CFOs.
The gender pay gap has largely stopped retreating in the 2000s, after narrowing in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Labor Department. Women were paid 20.6 percent less than men in 2003, while now they are paid 18.8 percent less.
Part of the pay gap may be due to the fact that women tend to land in lower-paying professions, according to the Labor Department. Eight percent of female professionals had jobs in the higher-paying industries of computers and engineering in 2010, in contrast to 43 percent of male professionals. At the same time, 69 percent of female professionals worked in education and health care, compared to 31 percent of male professionals.
Check out the GMI study below: