This is the type of thing that leads to so much confusion about statistics:
In its annual director pay survey, The Corporate Library, a corporate governance and executive compensation research group, reports the median earnings for female corporate directors is $120,000. That’s about $15,000 higher than the median total compensation for male directors, which is $104,375. “I was so surprised by the statistic,” says Paul Hodgson, senior research associate for The Corporate Library, who authored the study, which looked at the pay of more than 25,000 directors at more than 3,200 companies.
The problem is that this is raw data and so there could easily be many confounding factors that disguise a problem. I can think of one right away: there are very few women on these boards and so, perhaps, the women that are selected are much more well-known on average and so get higher pay–the possible discrimination would be disguised even though it’s real. In any set of data that comes from observation there will be confounding factors, so we need to see more of the details before we can see what might be happening.
