Monday, November 12, 2007

Reverse pay gap - borad directors

Uhhhh… where’s the outrage?? Where is NEWSWEEK’s 20-page special report on appalling wage discrimination against male corporate directors who were so discriminated against that they earn only 87 percent of what female directors earn?
I also looked through New York Times, Washington Post and the Time magazine for any special reports, article, or op-ed that bring the nation’s attention to this outrageous discrimination, but I found none. And then I realized, - oh, yes, it is WOMEN who is outearning men, not the other way around – of course in this case the whole media would go silent.

But why is the disparity? I could speculate a few reasons behind this.

Maybe the board has to put token women director in senior posts, which would come with higher compensations than the rest of directors – this would be understandable as corporations would naturally want to advertise their diversity efforts by putting the token hires in more visible, senior positions.

Also, a larger corporation are more likely to have additional financial resources to place token directors, who cannot contribute to substantive works but could contribute, by their very presence, to meet diversity goals and satisfy diversity-compliance monitors, and one could expect that compensations for directors at large corporations are higher than that of smaller corporations who may not have much room for diversity hires.

Of course, these are my mere speculations and do not have nay data to back up, but looks quite plausible. Maybe I should look into the data someday.

No comments: