Gender Pay Gap Persists for Nonprofit CEOs and Could Worsen Amid DEI Backlash

While salaries for nonprofit executives continue to grow, compensation for women leaders still hasn’t caught up to male leaders, especially at large organizations, recent data shows. And in a moment when the smaller nonprofits that women tend to lead are being strained by federal funding cuts and layoffs, the trend of women being shut out of top positions at bigger organizations may result in less diversity among nonprofit leaders, experts say.

Women make up the majority of CEOs at smaller organizations, but they represent less than one-third of CEOs at organizations with annual budgets of more than $50 million, according to the latest annual pay report by Candid, a research organization specializing in nonprofit data and analysis. About 58 percent of nonprofits with budgets of $250,000 or less were led by women, while just 31 percent of those with budgets of more than $50 million had female CEOs, the report found. Generally, the median compensation for female executives was lower than that of male CEOs at organizations of all sizes.

Candid’s 2025 Nonprofit Compensation Report, the 25th edition of the annual report, analyzed data from the 2023 tax filings of 130,794 tax-exempt organizations. The report shows variation in wages based on gender, organization size, program areas, and geographic location.

“This continues to be the most comprehensive study of executive compensation in the social sector, and the largest to date,” said Reina Mukai, Candid’s senior data services manager and one of the authors of the report. “The data helps organizations ask better questions and make more informed decisions about executive compensation, grounded in what’s happening across the field.”

This year’s report findings, which show persistent pay disparities based on gender and geography, are largely consistent with those published last year. The median salary rose from about $121,000 in 2019 to roughly $137,000 in 2023, but a gender pay gap persists even as executive compensation trends higher year-over-year, Candid found.

This latest data comes during a shift in the country’s economy spurred by federal funding cuts and mass layoffs in the government and other industries that have disproportionately impacted women workers. While men have gained jobs since January, more than 212,000 women left the workforce during that period, according to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With women over-represented in the nonprofit sector, experts worry that current financial strains, especially among smaller nonprofits, could result in significant losses of women workers and leaders. However, some also see the potential for nonprofits to attract women workers.

“Nonprofits have an opportunity here to pull from top talent that the federal government lost,” Misty Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas, recently told the Chronicle.

However, drawing that talent to large nonprofits could require changes that include stronger commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion among boards, even as such efforts are facing a backlash, according to Young-joo Lee, a philanthropy professor at Indiana University who researches nonprofit governance and women’s leadership.

The barriers to hiring women CEOs at large nonprofits can be directly linked to the makeup of their boards, she said. Boards for bigger organizations tend to be dominated by men, and when members refer people for leadership positions, they tend to be other men, Lee said. Boards with greater gender diversity are more likely to approve the hiring of women CEOs, she added.

“Having more women, between one-third and half, on the board increases the likelihood of hiring a female CEO,” she said. “And the same goes for people of color. If you have more people of color on the board, the organization is more likely to have a CEO of color.”

In recent years, there had been an increase in organizations focused on creating more demographically diverse boards and creating committees focused on equitable hiring practices, but it’s unclear how those initiatives might move forward now that the political environment is less favorable to DEI practices, she said.

Other findings from Candid’s report:

• CEOs of tax-exempt organizations in the Northeast continue to pay higher salaries than those in other regions of the country.
• The five program areas with the highest median executive compensation in 2023 were: science and technology research institutes and services; medical research; health; mutual/membership benefit organizations; and social science research.
• The five program areas with the lowest median CEO pay in 2023 were: religion-related; spiritual development; animal-related; recreation, sports, leisure and athletics; arts, culture, and humanities; and food, agriculture, and nutrition.
• In addition to nonprofit CEOs, the median compensation for other top executive positions in finance, administration, operations, and development also increased between 2019 and 2023.