CEO compensation rose 4.9 percent for women and 8.9 percent for men at nonprofits with annual budgets exceeding $50 million in 2016, according to a new study from GuideStar that underscores the persistence of the “gender gap” in pay at the nation’s largest nonprofits.
As a result, these large nonprofits made almost no progress in closing the gender pay gap, which stood at 20 percent in 2016 and 21 percent in 2015.
The situation was not much better for organizations with annual budgets of $25 million to $50 million, where the gap in median CEO compensation was 16 percent in 2016 and 17 percent in 2015.
“In the highest budget brackets, the gender gap is not decreasing, said Holly Ivel, the director of data services at GuideStar.
Meanwhile, the pay gap was significantly narrower at small and midsize charities, the report shows, with those organizations generally making more progress in 2016. However, Ivel noted that a change in methodology made year-to-year comparisons for the smallest organizations less reliable.
“Even though there’s still a pay gap, that gap seems to be shrinking in midsized organizations,” she said, adding, “While it’s still got a long ways to go, it’s trending more significantly in the right direction.”
At organizations with budgets of $2.5 million to $25 million, women over all had bigger pay increases than men, which helped close the pay gap at those organizations, Ivel said.
Meager Pay Raises
The report examined nonprofit CEO information based on data reported to the IRS.
Other findings include:
- CEO pay raises for both men and women at smaller organizations were meager — less than 2 percent for nonprofits with annual budgets of less than $50 million.
- Since 2005, women have made gains in the percentage of CEOs in organizations of all sizes. Gains have been most dramatic at organizations with budgets of $25 million to $50 million, where female leadership increased from 20 percent to 30 percent. Over all, smaller organizations on the whole are more likely to have a woman lead the nonprofit, Ivel said.
- Median salaries were highest at nonprofits doing work in program areas requiring more specialized knowledge including science and technology research, medical research, and health. The biggest one-year gain was in the area of health, from $133,933 in 2015 to $144,271 in 2016.
- In program areas with already lower compensation, the median salaries dipped particularly in groups that focused on religious and spiritual development, going from $59,638 to $55,627. Animal groups declined from $64,574 to $63,177, and art and culture organizations decreased from $71,629 to $69,225.
More Trends to Watch
Ivel said a new item in this year’s report was the growth in human resources and information-technology jobs at nonprofits. The number of these jobs, the GuideStar report said, grew more noticeably once the nonprofit reached a $1 million budget — and even more so with each higher bracket up to a $25 million.
Ivel said it can be difficult to categorize the roles people play in smaller organizations — sometimes they perform a wide variety of tasks. “The reality is that these are statistics and medians,” she said. “It’s not always the exact same populations year to year. It has a lot to do with how the positions are listed in a giving filing as to whether or not we can include them or code them into the study.”
Copies of the 2018 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report are available for $374 on the GuideStar website.