The first woman to serve as CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, was paid $16.1 million in 2012, including salary and stock awards, according to documents the company filed with the SEC yesterday.
That includes $1.5 million base pay, a $4 million bonus, and more than $9 million in long-term stock awards.
Although it's hard to call anyone who makes $16 million a year underpaid, in some ways she might be.
It's true that her pay is fair from a historic lens. The previous CEO, Sam Palmisano, started in 2002 and earned $1.43 million in salary and $4.5 million in bonuses that year, for a total of $5.93 million. Adjusted for inflation, that would be worth about $7 million today.
Flash forward to 2012, Rometty's first full year as CEO.
Sam Palmisano earned far more than Rometty last year for serving 10 months as chairman. Rometty took over the chairman role in October.
He took home $37 million, including more than $1.6 million in salary and $18.5 million in stock. That also included a $13.8 million increase in pension benefits and over $2 million in "other" compensation, mostly personal travel expenses on IBM planes. (Rometty logged $687,725 in other pay—mainly personal travel, too.)
Now look at Rometty's pay compared to others in the industry—two other top women tech CEOs and two big IBM rivals.
Seems hard to believe that Rometty's pay should be roughly equal to Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman's, given the year HP has had under Whitman's command. But there it is.
Rometty's getting paid far less per dollar of market cap than any of these CEOs. Here are the most-current numbers:
| CEO | Company | Pay | Market Cap | Revenues |
| Ginni Rometty | IBM | $16M | $235 billion | $104 billion |
| Meg Whitman | HP | $15.4M | $41 billion | $120.4 billion |
| Marissa Mayer | Yahoo | $19M | $25 billion | $4.5 billion |
| John Chambers | Cisco | $11.7M | $115 billion | $46.1 billion |
| Larry Ellison | Oracle | $96M | $167 billion | $37.2 billion |
