A Safer Meta Starts With How Its Executives Are Paid

Meta’s back-to-back courtroom losses in New Mexico and Los Angeles courts this week represent the first time that litigators have bypassed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects online platforms from liability for user-posted content. Although Section 230 still shields platforms from being treated as publishers of user-generated content, juries in New Mexico and Los Angeles found Meta liable for platform design features that cause personal injury to children.

Following these novel legal theories driving landmark rulings — which Meta says it respectfully disagrees with — the time has come for Meta’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to apply the nimbleness he honed building Meta and practicing mixed martial arts to the company’s executive compensation structure. It’s time to tie Meta’s executive compensation to child safety. READ MORE

Security, DEI And Tariffs: Executive Compensation Insights From Late 2025 And Early 2026 Proxy Filers

As a follow-up to last year’s review of the first 100 S&P 500 proxy filers in 2025, Pearl Meyer examined executive compensation disclosures from 37 S&P 500 companies whose fiscal year ended between August and November 2025 and who filed shareholder proxy statements by February 6, 2026. Our focus was on examining trends related to current topics of interest among compensation committees.  READ MORE

2026 Update: Nonprofit Compensation Packages of $1 Million or More

The list below includes the top three compensation packages of $1 million or more at each nonprofit rated by CharityWatch. The Compensation column includes total of base compensation, bonus and incentive compensation, retirement and deferred compensation, nontaxable benefits, and other reportable compensation as reported to the IRS (Form W-2, 1099-MISC, and/or 1099-NEC), excluding any amounts already reported by the organization in a prior year IRS Form 990. Retirement payouts, deferred compensation, severance, and bonuses that (a) comprise 75% or more of total annual compensation, or (b) total to $1 million or more are footnoted. Footnotes with additional detail are provided below certain individuals on the list. READ MORE

Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for the Regions — December 2025

Private industry employer costs for employee compensation among the four regions of the country ranged from $41.21 per hour in the South to $53.99 in the Northeast in December 2025, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In the other two regions, hourly employer costs for employee compensation stood at $43.26 in the Midwest and $50.85 in the West. (See chart 1.) In addition to regional estimates, employer costs for nine smaller geographic divisions are also available. Within divisions, total compensation costs ranged from $36.70 per hour in the East South Central division to $54.56 in the Pacific division. (See table 1.) Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) are based on the National Compensation Survey, which measures employer costs for wages, salaries, and employee benefits. READ MORE

Pay transparency laws surge: how to turn compliance into strategy

Compliance is a quickly changing challenge for today’s HR leaders, with patchworks of local, state and federal laws testing HR’s ability to keep up. The challenge becomes even greater for the increasing number of organizations deploying talent across the globe. While the increasing pace of change is universal, pay transparency is one of the areas in which compliance regulations are evolving most quickly.

According to new research from Mercer, by 2025, more than two-thirds of organizations around the world had implemented or were in the process of implementing a pay transparency strategy. That figure stands at 81% for U.S.-based organizations, where 48% share pay information both internally and externally. READ MORE

How executive pay parity is redefining women in leadership

International Women’s Day is a reminder that, while progress has been made, there is still work to be done—especially at the executive level. For years, gender equity at this level has been tied to representation, but compensation is the more meaningful signal.

Recent data from the World Economic Forum estimates it will take 123 years for women in North America to reach economic parity. However, new data from ON Partners’ Women’s Report tells a more encouraging story at the top levels of leadership. Across the senior vice president and chief financial officer levels, women are making more than men in similar roles—and in tech, where the playing field has historically titled male, female CTO and CITO executives have ranked among the top earners in placements over the past two years. READ MORE

Measuring CEO Pay-for-Performance: Demonstrating Alignment with Shareholder Outcomes

Demonstrating that executive compensation is meaningfully aligned with company performance and the shareholder experience remains one of the most important, and most debated, issues in U.S. executive pay decision-making and corporate governance in general. While boards, investors, executives, and proxy advisors broadly agree on the principle of “pay for performance,” there is far less agreement on how that alignment should be measured and evaluated in practice.

Two analytical challenges sit at the center of this debate. The first is determining a fair and competitive level of target compensation. The second, and more controversial challenge, is assessing whether the compensation ultimately earned by executives appropriately reflects company performance and shareholder outcomes over time. This Viewpoint focuses on the techniques used to evaluate pay‑for‑performance alignment—an area that remains highly contested. Traditional approaches to this analysis have relied heavily on grant‑date values for stock awards included in the Summary Compensation Table (SCT) pay, which reflect future opportunity rather than realized or realizable pay outcomes. READ MORE

Equipping workers with insights about compensation

Wage information shapes important decisions: what jobs people apply for, whether they negotiate, and whether a particular career path is worth pursuing. But unlike the price of most goods, the price of labor is often hard to find and difficult to interpret—especially for workers who are early in their careers, switching fields, or moving locations.

AI is a new type of labor-market resource. Rather than requiring a worker to search across multiple websites, interpret scattered salary pages, or ask a socially risky question, a model can synthesize wage information and return a benchmark in seconds. Workers are already using ChatGPT this way, sending nearly 3 million messages per day, on average in the US, asking about wages, compensation, or earnings. READ MORE

Rethinking fair pay: Beyond the living wage

Today’s world is one in which transparency and fairness are increasingly expected and championed. At the same time, the conversation around compensation is not only more open, but is being actively rewritten. It’s certainly a hot topic, as 55% of U.S. workers believe their salary is lower than it should be, and only 4% of workers feel truly valued in their role, according to Resume Now.

For HR leaders, the challenge is not simply to keep pace, but to lead both conversation and direction. They must strive to create cultures where every colleague feels valued, acknowledged, respected and empowered to thrive. As Group Director Human Resources at Stahl, I have spent my career at the intersection of economics, business and law, with a singular focus: people. Today, as economic inequality and labour rights dominate global discourse, the question is not just “what is a fair wage?” but “how do we ensure pay truly
reflects impact and contribution?” READ MORE

OC Supervisors Say It’s Illegal to Slash Their Salary Hikes

Orange County Supervisors will not rescind the 25% raise they gave themselves last year despite a scathing grand jury report that called them out for a lack of transparency and urged them to return the money by the end of this month. 

“This decision was not only tone-deaf—it reflected a deeper disconnect from the Board’s duty to serve the public with transparency and fiscal responsibility,” the OC Grand Jury wrote in a report released in December.  READ MORE

10 high-paying careers where women make up the majority of workers—most pay more than $100,000

While progress toward gender parity remains slow, several career paths offer above-average representation of women as well as high pay, according to a report from Resume Genius published Mar. 3.

Resume Genius, an online career platform and resume builder, identified the top 10 careers with high median salaries and projected job growth in which women make up 50% or more of workers, using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. READ MORE

Senators revive bill to claw back executive pay when banks fail

The bipartisan Senate bill would mandate that large bank executives surrender their salaries and bonuses if their bank fails.

Three years after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators, which includes Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), reintroduced legislation to “ensure that big bank executives are not allowed to collect massive paychecks and bonuses, disregard prudent risk management, and walk away scot-free if the bank blows up.” The Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act of 2026 would ensure that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has the authority to “hold executives of failed banks financially responsible for some of the costs those failures impose on the rest of the banking system and the economy,” according to a press release. The bill would allow the FDIC to claw back at least part of the compensation bank executives received over the three-year period preceding a bank’s failure. READ MORE