Gender pay gap among executive directors: Theoretical insights and perspectives from the critical organizational context of nonlisted government-owned enterprises

The gender pay gap, including among executive directors, is a long-standing corporate governance and ethical issue in business and society, with prevailing controversial academic debates calling for further exploration of this context-driven phenomenon. Going beyond the numerous studies on the gender pay gap for private listed enterprises, this study investigates the theoretically salient, critical, yet unexplored organizational context of nonlisted government-owned enterprises. It analyzes a panel dataset spanning 2006–2020, comprising 4,187 executive director observations across 307 German nonlisted government-owned enterprises. The study provides evidence for a pay gap for female executive directors despite specific ethical norms and value expectations in the government-owned enterprise context. Furthermore, in government-owned enterprises with a female board chair, a smaller gender pay gap for female EDs exists. The study enhances the theoretical understanding of the gender pay gap phenomenon in role congruity theory debates. It theoretically and empirically shows the importance of distinguishing between different organizational contexts within a country context when examining gender pay gaps, highlighting the critical and theoretically fruitful organizational context of government-owned enterprises. Furthermore, it indicates that the board chair gender is an important contextual factor for future theoretical debates. Overall, this study opens up the critical organizational context of nonlisted government-owned enterprises as a fertile avenue for future research on the gender pay gap and related theoretical discourses, thereby advancing scholarship and informing practitioners and policymakers.