Apple’s senior vice president of retail and online stores Angela Ahrendts was the highest paid female executive in the United States in 2014, Bloomberg’s Pay Index has revealed.
Ahrendts was the chief executive officer of London’s high end fashion retailer Burberry before taking on her role at Apple in May last year. Her move made her the first woman on Apple’s executive management team.
In her first year at the company, Ahrendts earned AU$103.99 million, making her the highest earning woman on Bloomberg’s newly released list of executive pay packets for 2014.
Ahrendts began her career in the fashion industry, landing a job at Donna Karen straight out of her marketing degree at Ball State University in Indiana. She rose through the ranks of the fashion world quickly, being appointed CEO of Burberry by age 46, and shortly afterwards switching industries and taking the vice-presidency role at Apple.
Not only did Ahrendts earn more than any other female executive in 2014, she also out-earned her boss eight to one. Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook earned $11.7 million to Ahrendt’s $82 million.
Oracle’s chief financial officer Safra Catz came in at number two on Bloomberg’s Pay Index for female executives, earning $71.2 million in 2014. Next on the list was Yahoo’s CEO Melissa Mayer. The 39 year old chief executive earned $59.1 million, making her the highest paid CEO on the list.
The Bloomberg Pay Index also calculates an executive’s pay relative to the company’s overall economic profit for the year. On this measure, Ahrendts won again – she was awarded 0.3% of the company’s total $26.6 billion profit last year.
The issue of increasingly large executive pay packets has come to the fore recently, with debates about wage inequality gaining traction across the world. Here in Australia, outgoing Telstra CEO David Thodey said he could not defend his high salary.
Thodey, who earned almost $13 million last year, said wage inequality within organisations is a serious issue.
“I get paid a lot of money (and) my options, should they vest, are worth tens of millions of dollars. But I can’t sit here and defend my salary against all the guys who are out there working every day and I wouldn’t try to,” he said.
“I think there’s a real issue with income disparity between what an average person gets and some of the really big salaries.”
Thodey said he thought large companies could find more “creative ways” to organise labour in order to allow everybody to “share in the wealth creation process”.
The issue has been gaining attention in the United States as well – last month Gravity CEO Dan Price was Seattle,Washington decided he would personally take action against wealth inequality.
The chief executive, who currently earns $1 million per year, decided to take a substantial salary cut in order to pay every single one of his workers $70,000 each. This meant doubling some employees’ salaries and drastically raising others in order to level the playing field.
In fact, Price eliminated employee-CEO income disparity altogether – he cut his own pay to $70,000 for the next few years, meaning he and all of his employees are earning the exact same wage.