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The Highest-Paid Woman in Corporate America Is A CFO

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Who was the highest-paid female executive in the U.S. last year? Perhaps PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi comes to mind? Or Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer? While they feature prominently in the top 10 list of highest-compensated female executives, pole position was held by Safra Ada Catz, Oracle CFO and President, according to Find the Best research.

Catz earned $44.3 million last year, according to this data. The Israel-born executive is #24 on the Forbes 2014 Power Women list.

We still question the lack of female CEOs in America, but perhaps a better question to ask is how many female executives in total, at American companies? According to the same research that looks at over 200 public and private U.S. companies, it's 11,277. Compare that with 104,701 male executives.

Only 4.9 percent of Fortune 500 companies are helmed by women, but I'm more interested that just under 11 percent of executives in public and private corporations across America are female.

And while Catz leads the pack as the highest-paid CFO – male or female – most female executives don't fall in this category. In fact, of the five best-paid executives at each of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index companies in 2012, only 8 percent were women. But these high-achievers on average earned 18 percent less than men, according to Bloomberg.

Safra Catz, Oracle President (Photo credit: Oracle_Photos_Screenshots)

As evidenced by Catz, compensation isn't necessarily dictated by the CEO title. Some of the other highly-paid executives on the list included Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Ralph Lauren COO Jackwyn L. Nemerov. It's time we examine the number of women in the C-Suite as a whole, not just those in the CEO role.

In case you're wondering, Catz's compensation last year broke down like this: $5,055 an hour, $84 a minute, and $1.40 a second, according to Find the Best. That's 111 times Barack Obama's salary and 836 times the median US household income.

And if you really want to torture yourself, Find the Best gives you an option to compare how many years you would have to work on your current salary, to make as much as a particular executive makes in one year. I would have to work nearly 600 years to make what Catz does in one year.

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