Women CEOs earn big pay, but rarely get the top jobs

Women CEOs earned big bucks last year, but there's still very few of them running the world's largest companies.

The median pay for a female CEO was $13.1 million last year, up 9% from 2015, according to an analysis by executive data firm Equilar and The Associated Press. By comparison, male CEOs earned $11.4 million, also up 9%.

But the number of women in CEO roles has barely budged. Just 6% of the top paid CEOs in the US last year were women, according to the analysis, a slight increase from about 5% in 2015 and 2014.

To calculate pay, Equilar added salary, bonus, perks, stock awards, stock option awards, and other types of compensation. Equilar only looked at companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index that filed proxy statements with federal regulators between Jan. 1 and May 1, 2017. And it only included CEOs who have been in their roles for at least two years in order to exclude sign-on bonuses. Of the 346 CEOs in that group, just 21 were women.

Experts say companies need to do more to get women into CEO roles. Janice Ellig, the co-CEO of executive search firm Chadick Ellig, says "unconscious bias" in the workplace is keeping women from getting opportunities that will put them on track to for top roles.

Companies need to "start recognizing that gender inequality exists," says Ellig, who is also chairperson of the Women's Forum of New York. "If you don't recognize a problem, you can't solve a problem."

Here are the top six female CEOs who made the most in 2016, according to the analysis: