Gender Pay Differences in Senior Management of Charities

In this paper, we investigate the market for senior management in the U.S. charities sector. Using charity-level data from 990 Forms filed for U.S. Internal Revenue Service, we document two new stylized facts not documented before in the literature. First, we find that female CEOs are more likely to receive compensation than male CEOs. Second, conditional on receiving compensation, female CEOs receive 8% lower total compensation than male CEOs. We show the gender pay gap is only present in the largest charities (top two quintiles in the revenue distribution). Both findings are robust to the inclusion of charity classification fixed effects (between estimator) and charity fixed effects (within estimator). Our exploration of mechanisms driving the gender pay gap in this context points out a mismatch between pay dispersion and performance dispersion. While pay dispersion across genders is consistent with organizations perceiving male managers as differentiated unlikefemale managers, and there are no differences in performance dispersion supporting this perception