FORTUNE — In finance, the pay gap between men and women goes all the way up to the C-suite.
Last year, the highest-ranking women executives working at the U.S.’s largest banks were paid an average of $5.6 million, including salary, bonuses, and deferred stock options. That’s a lot, but it’s just 78% of what male bank executives made, who received an average $7.2 million.
Even more striking is the gap in the number of female executives. Among the nation’s 24 largest banks, just 11 of the 129 individuals listed as top-paid employees last year were women. Those 11 women together made $62 million last year, a tidy sum to be sure. The larger male cohort, though, received $842 million.
Finance is known to have disparate pay. Nonetheless, the size of the gender gap is striking in part because it’s nearly as wide as the gap seen within the economy as a whole. Across all industries, females earn roughly 77% of their male counterparts, according to 2012 Census data, the most recent government stats on pay by gender. For finance specialists, that figure is 66%, according to a recent study by Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin. That was the lowest of any industry.
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Fortune crunched its numbers from the banks’ annual proxy statements, most of which have come out in the past few weeks. We looked at the 30 big banks that were included in the Fed’s most recent annual stress test, which were made public in early March. Six of the banks are divisions of foreign firms, so they didn’t file proxy statements for their U.S. operations. The Securities and Exchange Commission requires U.S. firms to include in their proxy statements the annual pay of the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and at least the next three highest-paid individuals.
President Obama has recently reiterated his call for equal pay for women. And there’s a bill in Congress calling for the same. Clearly, few in Washington will, or should, spend time lobbying for higher pay for Wall Street’s female executives. But the fact that even the top women in finance are getting shortchanged says something about what happens for all women when they start out on uneven footing.
Some of the pay discrepancy has to do with the fact that there are still very few women CEOs in finance. Only one of the large banks, KeyCorp (KEY), is led by a woman, Beth Mooney. She made $7.5 million in 2013. That was less than the $11.8 million average pay of the other banks’ CEOs.
Keycorp is one of the smaller of the 24 largest banks. Yet its stock rose 59% in 2013, one of the best performances among the big banks. It also has a slightly higher market cap than Ally, which paid its CEO, Michael Carpenter, $9.5 million last year.
Among chief financial officers, women executives actually did better than the men, $6.1 million on average compared to $5.1 million. But the two banks with women CFOs were JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Morgan Stanley (MS), which respectively rank as No. 1 and No. 6 among the largest banks. Among just the top six, the average pay for CFOs was $11.4 million. JPMorgan CFO Marianne Lake and Morgan Stanley’s Ruth Porat rank fourth and fifth in terms of pay of that group.
Lake, who became JPMorgan’s CFO in 2013, was paid $8.5 million last year, which was more than her predecessor, Doug Braunstein, was paid in 2012, the year of JPMorgan’s huge London Whale trading loss. But Braunstein made $12 million in 2010, the year he landed the CFO job.
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Among bank presidents, there are two women, who made an average $4.2 million in 2013. The male presidents earned $6.2 million on average.
Many women with impressive job titles didn’t even crack the list of many of the banks’ highest-paid executives. Karen Peetz, for example, is a vice chairman at Bank of New York Mellon (BK). Last year, American Banker ranked her as the most powerful woman in banking. Yet Peetz doesn’t show up among Bank of New York’s top-paid employees.
Bank of New York lists three vice chairs among its top-paid execs. All men.
