The next time you’re headed into a salary negotiation, do yourself a favor: channel Angela Ahrendts, the highest-paid executive on Coins2Day’s 2015 list of the Most Powerful Women.
Let’s count the remarkable things about Ahrendts’ place at the top of the comp list:
1. Her 2014 pay—$73.4 million—tops runner-up Marissa Mayer’s annual comp by more than $31 million. That differential alone is more than all but three of the women made last year.
2. She is the only woman in the top 10 best-paid who is not currently a CEO.
3. Her $70 million in stock awards—the factor that boosts her earnings into the stratosphere—are more than four times those of any other woman on the list.
3. Here’s the real jaw-dropper: Ahrendts joined Apple (AAPL) in May of a fiscal year that ended in September. That means our numbers are only capturing five months of pay.
That’s not to say that rest of the MPW aren’t doing quite well for themselves: As a group, the 33 women whose comp data is publicly available made a whopping $522 million last year. The median pay package came in at $12.1 million. That beats the typical CEO’s take: According to a study by Equilar and the AP, which looked at 340 CEOs of S&P 500 companies, the median 2014 pay was $10.6 million.
Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo (YHOO), came in at No. 2, with $42.1 million. That’s a big bump from last year, when she earned a total of $24.9 million. She can thank stock (valued at $11.8 million) and options (valued at $28.2 million) awards for the boost. Yahoo’s stock price surged by more than 25% in 2014, though it has since fallen back to Earth.
Oracle (ORCL) co-CEO Safra Catz comes in at No. 3. Like Ahrendts, Catz started her current job in the midst of the fiscal year, making her place near the top of the list even more impressive. Her $37.7 million pay is from the fiscal year ending May 2014, when she was still Oracle’s co-president and CFO. She became co-CEO, with Mark Hurd, in September of last year. We have yet to see what she’ll earn as co-chief, but it seems reasonable to expect that it will top her 2014 number.
Many of the women on this year’s list saw their comp increase in 2014. Carol Meyrowitz, CEO of TJX Companies (TJX); Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo (PEP) are among the long list of executives that pocketed more in 2014 vs. 2013.
So, who went the other direction? Facebook (FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg, for one. She was awarded fewer restricted stock units in 2014. Avon (AVP) CEO Sheri McCoy, also took a slight cut—perhaps not surprising when you consider that the company’s stock is now trading at less than $5 a share.
A note on our data, which is provided by Equilar: All compensation numbers include annual salary, of course, but also bonuses, stock and option awards, as well as any other compensation, such as use of the company plane. The only executives includes in the data set are women on Coins2Day’s 2015 Most Powerful Women list.
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