This chart shows the gender pay gap extends all the way to the top of the corporate ladder

The gender pay gap between men and women in the US continues to remain stubbornly large, and it extends even to the very top of the corporate pyramid.

According to a new study sent to Business Insider by executive networking and crowdsourcing firm ExecThread, offers made by recruiters to top-level male executives tend to be far higher than those made to their female counterparts.

ExecThread analyzed offers made to their members by executive search firms seeking top-level executives. According to ExecThread, these offers were for high-level positions that were not publicly advertised, instead coming from exclusive executive recruiters.

ExecThread crowdsourced 246 offers made by recruiters to their members for Senior Director, VP, SVP, and C-suite level positions. 55 of the offers were to women, and 191 were to men. They then compared the average low- and high-ends of the offers made to female executives with those made to male executives, as well as the average mid-points of the offer ranges. They found that men on average had higher offers than women:

ExecThread noted that the difference between the average offer midpoints for men and women was about $30,000. That is, on average, "men were approached by executive recruiters for job opportunities that pay 12.0% more than those jobs that executive recruiters approached women for," according to ExecThread.

The gender disparity among offers for high-level executive positions extends to the very top of that already high-flying group. Among the 18 ExecThread respondents who had offers with a midpoint between the high and low end of the salary range of at least $500,000, 17 were men and only one was a woman.

Reinforcing their findings that top male executives receive higher offers than top female executives, ExecThread ran a second analysis on a slightly larger set of offers that included Senior Manager and Director-level positions in addition to the senior executive positions in the first study. Using a statistical test that controlled for various job characteristics like industry, job type, and seniority level, they still found a large gender gap, with male executives being offered on average about $25,000 more than their female counterparts, all other things being equal.