Pressure to increase gender diversity in C-suites is so intense that companies are trying to draw women candidates with higher salary offers, a phenomenon that is closing the gender pay gap among senior executives, research shows.
Female executives still don’t earn as much as their male counterparts, but a woman in a senior leadership role who switches to a new firm can now expect a salary bump of 25 percent on average, whereas a man making a similar move will see 9 percent more pay, says Paul Healy, the James R. Williston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
A search firm executive who was interviewed as part of Healy’s research explained how eager companies are to recruit women to their upper ranks: “Virtually all of my clients [looking to fill a senior role] will go out of their way to include a woman on the short list,” the executive said. “… If a woman is not initially interested in a role because it is not quite big enough or broad enough for her, they’ll often say, ‘OK, OK. You can have this other division of the company as well.’ … They will absolutely happily pay more for women. There is just such a strong push and momentum behind bringing women onto the exec team.”
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[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]