While the gender pay gap remains a stubborn and vexing problem in American society, there’s one place where the issue all but vanishes: the very top.
Seventeen of the 200 top-paid executives on the new Bloomberg Pay Index are women. While that number may seem unimpressive at first glance, it’s actually disproportionately high when you consider that there are only 21 female CEOs in the Coins2Day 500.
The highest-paid woman on the ranking is Oracle (ORCL) co-CEO Safra Catz, who made $57 million last year in special equity awards, annual stock grants, and salary, according to Bloomberg. Catz’s compensation, as well as that of her co-CEO Mark Hurd and Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has been heavily scrutinized by shareholders, the majority of whom have voted against the executives’ pay packages.
The second woman on the list is Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google (GOOG) parent Alphabet Inc. She raked in $41 million last year, included a $5 million signing bonus. Coming in at No. 3 is GM (GM) CEO Mary Barra, who made $36 million in 2015.
Angela Ahrendts, who was the top-paid female executive in 2014, according to the Bloomberg Index, now ranks fifth on the list. The Apple (AAPL) SVP received $81.6 million in total compensation when she left her post at Burberry in 2014. Last year, Ahrendts, who oversees Apple’s retail and online stores, earned a comparatively modest $28 million.
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This isn’t the first evidence that women at the very top of the corporate pyramid aren’t subject to the same gender pay gap that the rest of us experience: A recent analysis of the 100 largest public companies found that the female CEOs of these giants out-earned their male peers in 2015.
