A review of publicly available data on the top employees and salaries of 30 U.S non-profits working in global development found that the gender gap at the highest levels may be wide, including when it comes to pay.

A review of a randomized sample of 30 U.S. organizations (ten each from foundations, think tanks, and NGOs) that work on global development found:

  • Less than a third of key/high paid employees at the sampled U.S. think tanks are women although in the sample of foundations there was parity between the number of men and women.
  • Key/high paid women appear to be paid less than key/high-paid men in all three of the sample groups, and very few of the highest-paid employees in organizations connected to global development are women – a total of five out of thirty across the three groups.
  •  Women make up 75 percent of the nonprofit workforce, but just 18 percent of the largest nonprofits’ CEOs are women, and they earn up to 8 percent less than their male peers.

“These are preliminary findings, but they suggest that U.S. institutions involved in international development may not be sufficiently practicing what they preach when it comes to gender equality,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a co-author of the preliminary study.

Read more on the gender gap in development non-profits by Apri Podder at My Social Good News.