Gender pay gap closing among German board members: men are slowly catching up | Hacker News Reader

Gender pay gap closing among German board members: men are slowly catching up

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42 pointskleiba26 comments

I'm confused. The title says this is about the pay gap among top CEOs. But all the charts in the presentation are about payment of board members EXCLUDING the CEO. Am I missing something, or is this title wildly inaccurate?

Yes, the title is wrong. The study is about "Vorstände", which means "board members".

"Fixed, variable, and total board member compensation of DAX/MDAX/SDAX companies by gender (2013 to 2021) [GER]" would be my title suggestion

It's not about board members in the sense the term is used for U.S. public corporations. “Executive team” or “C-level employees” would probably be more accurate for comparison. These people are typically full-time employees of the corporation. Not external directories, no-show jobs, or anything like that.

German public corporations have a separate board representing stakeholder interests. It's not a full-time job (typically just a few meetings per year, and in theory some legal responsibility), and some of the board members are not employed by the corporation. Considering the time commitment, typical compensation for board members is still very, very generous, but much lower annually than the numbers quoted in the report.

> men are slowly catching up

How the turn tables...

I don't know, but my feeling is that this might be a symptom of selection of a very specific group of people? Note that there are also around 10x more men included in these groups.

Why is this flagged @ HN? The title could use some cleanup, should be "board members", not CEO

Besides the lie, it’s also editorialized to be clickbait.

which lie?

It being about CEOs

I honestly think it's a translation error.

My german is not good but most (all?) graphs in the report seem to talk about executives or board members, but excluding CEOs (ohne CEOs). Does the title need an edit?

It does

Woman make up ~14% of board members in Dax companies.

However, somehow, the phrasing of this thread implies it’s the men that are disadvantaged. Curious what the intentions of op is.

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/frauenanteil-dax-konzer...

> However, somehow, the phrasing of this thread implies it’s the men that are disadvantaged. Curious what the intentions of op is.

It's rather obvious isn't it? There are fewer of them, but when they're there, they earn more.

That's right. Women have been earning more for some time, but as this document shows, the gap is getting smaller.

The article is about salary not voting power.

Since you're citing tagesschau.de, I see that there is an article about the topic of this thread there as well: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/frauen-vors...

It's board members, not CEOs. Women do 1.1% better for DAX (40 large cap companies), 0.1% better for SDAX (70 small cap companies) and 4.7% worst for MDAX (60 mid cap companies).

So the few women that are board members in average are compensated 1.1% better at DAX companies, that's the story.

I think the story is that the difference in compensation is getting lower.

a) It’s about execs, excluding CEOs

b) A relevant piece of information is the total number ("n=xxx" on the bars) which shows there are 6 times as many male execs as there are female ones.

The male/female distribution doesn't surprise me - the pay distribution does.

It’s (as the PDF shows) been that way for quite a while. Women get into higher paying jobs less often, but if they do, they often get paid better.

Correct. But that doesn't make it less surprising.

It reminds me of the quip (which I think was true at some point): there are fewer women among the CEOs of DAX companies than there are men named Thomas.

Relevant XKCD: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant

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