Will two executive-level people doing the same job with the same education background and experience be paid differently? The answer is yes. And unsurprisingly, one of the two is female. How big is the gender pay gap at the executive level? Professor Huang Rong at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, who studied a sample of over 34,000 executives from US publicly traded firms using data spanning an 18-year period, found women executives are paid 31% less than male executives. Although it can partly be explained by objective considerations such as title, experience, company size and performance, a 19% gap still exists.