Is the push for gender pay parity regressing? The gender pay gap among executives at S&P 500 companies widened in 2020 to its highest level since 2012, according to a Morningstar report. On average, women in executive positions earned 75% of what their male counterparts earned in 2020 — a drop from 88% in 2018, the report says. The gender gap is slightly narrower among named executive officers (i.e. the CEO, CFO, and the next-most highly paid executive officer), with women earning 81% of men’s median pay in 2020.

The widening gap in pay parity comes despite women occupying more executive positions at these companies (albeit at a painfully slow pace of growth): Since 2012, the number of women in NEO positions at these companies inched up to just 14% by 2020, up 6 percentage points from 2012. However, there’s a serious dearth of women at the very top position: “The number of woman-headed S&P companies inched up to 5.5% from 4.3%,” according to Morningstar. And there are are rarely companies that have more than woman NEO, with only 16% of companies having two or more women as NEOs in 2020.

By way of comparison, how’s Egypt doing with women’s representation at public companies? While we don’t have compiled data available on the gender distribution of c-suite positions in Egyptian companies, the Financial Regulatory Authority had said last year that around 85% of EGX-listed businesses have at least one woman sitting on their boards. The regulator had introduced a requirement in 2020 that all boards in publicly traded companies have at least one woman member, before upping that regulation to require the boards of EGX-listed firms and non-banking financial services companies to be at least 25% composed of women.

But the real crux of the gap isn’t in base salaries — it’s the overall benefits package: The biggest culprit behind the widening gap, Morningstar says, is the inequality in income from stock-related awards. Men’s and women’s base salaries, while not exactly equitable, have followed the same growth trajectory between 2012 and 2020. However, options, restricted stock, and performance shares awards incomes show significant differences between men and women: “This trend favors men, whose share-based pay increased, on average, nearly 30 percentage points more than that of women over the survey period. Whereas women in the C-suite saw a 20% rise in share-based pay, men in the C-suite enjoyed a whopping 49% increase in this component — with the gap opening considerably in 2019 and 2020,” Morningstar writes.

The outlook: At the current pace, women need another four decades to reach fairness in terms of pay in the top executive positions, Morningstar said, citing an average pay to women of 83% of what men earn in the US.