Women serving as general counsel at major public companies made 16% more than men in the same roles last year, according to a new study — another data point burying the claim that systemic discrimination keeps women from the top dollar.
The Equilar study, conducted with executive search firm BarkerGilmore, found female general counsel at the largest publicly traded companies took home an average package of nearly $3 million in 2025 — a median salary of $672,000 plus $2.3 million in equity. Men in identical positions earned $657,000 in salary and $1.9 million in equity. That 16% premium for women nearly doubled from an 8.5% edge the year before.
The reason? Negotiation. "It's not the base salaries, not the cash bonus, those are all pretty standard," John Gilmore, co-founder of BarkerGilmore, told the New York Post. "It's that the women are getting higher equity." In other words, when women in these roles advocate for themselves in compensation talks, they win — which is exactly what the meritocracy crowd has been saying for decades.
The Post noted that the broader workforce still shows women earning about 20% less than men — a figure the grievance industry treats as proof of discrimination. But that crude comparison never accounted for different jobs, hours, career interruptions, or willingness to negotiate. The general counsel data proves the point: when you compare men and women doing the same work at the same level, the gap doesn't just shrink — it flips.
Not that you'd know it from the DEI apparatus still embedded across corporate America. Diversity consultants, equity officers, and the entire grievance-industrial complex depend on the narrative that women are systematically shortchanged. Their paychecks depend on the problem never being solved. The Equilar study also found men still out-earned women in CFO, COO, and other top executive roles — which the usual suspects will seize on while ignoring the general counsel numbers entirely.
So who profits from keeping the wage-gap myth alive? The consultants collecting fees to "fix" it. The HR departments justifying their budgets. The politicians campaigning on it. Ordinary Americans — male and female — get stuck with the bill in the form of mandatory training seminars and hiring quotas that reward demographics over competence.
The data keeps coming. The question is how long the grievance industry can keep pretending it doesn't exist.
