Executive Gender Pay Gaps:the Roles Of Female Chairman、Proportion Of Female Executives And Industry

In recent years,as management scholars have begun to pay attention to income inequality in the business environment,the pay gap caused by gender has also caused extensive discussion.Domestic research on gender pay differentials is relatively insufficient.Most of the researches were focused on the general labor market,and there is not enough attention paid to the pay gender differences in senior management positions.So far,the empirical experience of the executive gender pay gap has only to come from developed countries.In the emerging economies,the remuneration of women executives remains to be verified.More and more women in China are becoming business leaders and playing an increasingly important role in the global economy.It is of great significance to find out whether gender brings a compensation gap and the way to narrow the gap.Therefore,the research question in this paper is(1)Is there a gender pay gap in executive compensation in China as well?(2)If it exists,is there a mechanism to narrow the pay gap?A large number of studies have shown that the stereotype of women in the labor market.Compared to male executives,female executive group presents low pay bargaining power,and access to disadvantages such as weak social connections and social capital.This may result in low pay for female executives.The compensation is actually determined by the board of directors.If female holds the position of chairman of the board,it may be easier for women executives to get approval and increase their compensation which helps narrow the gender pay gap.In addition,if the proportion of female executives in a company is relatively low,on the one hand,communication barriers and transaction costs between the majority and minority groups make female executives vulnerable,which may helps widen pay gap.On the other hand,the scarcity of female executives reflects its superior capabilities and the diversification of corporate human resources,the female executives have more advantages than male executives with similar capabilities.Therefore,from the perspective of supply and demand economics and corporate human resources strategy,companies may need to pay more premiums for female executives,which will eventually helps narrow pay gap.In order to confirm this point,we selected industry as an indicator of the tendency to diversify and observe its impact on the gender pay gap.This paper selects the sample of the CSMAR database from 2007 to 2016 in this paper.Based on the existing research,it controls the attributes of the enterprise level and the human capital level and proves that there is a significant gender pay gap among executives,Female chairman of the board,the smaller the proportion of female executives,the higher industry diversification tendency devotes to smaller gender pay gap.