Female chief executives are out-earning their male counterparts at some of the nation’s largest businesses.

Women in the top roles at the biggest U.S. companies out-earned men in six out of the past seven years, The Wall Street Journal reports. Some 21 female chief executives earned a median compensation of $13.8 million in 2016, compared to 382 male chief executives that earned a median compensation of $11.6 million.

Women still comprise a disproportionately low percentage of all chief executive officers, notching nearly 5 percent of the total in 2016. Despite their low representation, however, female chief executives took three of the 10 spots for highest paid CEOs in 2016.

S&P 500 firms run by females generated a median total shareholder return 2.4 percent above what firms run by male chief executives produced.

The dominant narrative surrounding the gender pay gap is that women earn, on average, 79.6 cents on the dollar for doing the same job as a man. From the American Association of University Women to The Boston Globe to The Huffington Post, the misconceptions surrounding the gender pay gap are far reaching and well reported.

There are many factors that help explain the pay gap, like: “how many hours women spend at the office, how much time they are taking off of work, childbirth,” among other factors, Romina Boccia, a leading fiscal and economic expert at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. (RELATED: British Think Tank Swings And Misses On Gender Pay Gap)

“What we know from economic research, including research coming out of the Department of Labor under the Obama Administration, is that once you account for the factors that explain the wage gap, many of them have to do with preferences between men and women as to work/life balance,” Boccia told TheDCNF.

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