The Gender Gap in Compensation

To the Editor:

It is ironic that next to the last section of the article “A Growing Disparity” (November 10), where some of the highest-paid nonprofit leaders attempt to justify their salaries by comparing them to salaries in the for-profit world, is a story reporting on a survey that showed donors are concerned about executive pay and say that salaries in the nonprofit world “should not match those in the commercial world.”

Furthermore, in the October 13 article “Female Charity Executives Win Big Increase in Pay,” it is stated that men outnumber women as the chief executives 6:1 at the largest nonprofits. The November 10 article profiled only men, and did not clarify that the majority of small and medium-size nonprofits, the great bulk of all nonprofits, are led by women.

Women still are paid significantly less than men, even at those organizations. In fact, the great majority of all nonprofit employees (those whose pay does not rise in proportion to their groups’ leaders) are women, yet this article singled out some of the highest-paid males, almost all white, as a very nonrepresentative group, to make a distorted point. It is not being questioned that nonprofit executives get paid substantially more than their staffs; what is being questioned here is that those particular leaders’ salaries do not represent the pay of most nonprofit executive directors, who toil for far less than the six-figure salaries mentioned in the article.

Sheryl Kaplan
Grants Consultant
Los Angeles