Lisa Miller, New York Magazine
September 7, 2014
Only about 5 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are run by women; double the sample size, and the proportion is the same. Compensation levels for female CEOs appear to lag as well, though it's hard to tell because there are so few of them. On a recent list of America's 200 highest-paid CEOs, only 11 were women, and their median pay was $1.6 million less than their male peers. Certain of these women are already household names: Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, No. 34 on the list, who earned $25 million last year, and Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman, No. 95, who earned $17 million. But the highest-paid female CEO in America is not nearly as well known. She is Martine Rothblatt, the 59-year-old founder of United Therapeutics—a publicly traded, Silver Spring, Maryland–based pharmaceutical company—who made a previous fortune as the founder of Sirius Radio, a field she entered as an attorney specializing in the law of space. But what's really extraordinary about Rothblatt's ascent is not that she has leaned in, or out, or had any particular thoughts about having it all. What sets Rothblatt apart from the other women on the list is that she—who earned $38 million last year—was born male.
"It's like winning the lottery," Rothblatt said happily after seeing her name atop the list during one of the meetings I had with her this summer. But Rothblatt could not be less interested in establishing herself as a role model for women. "I can't claim that what I have achieved is equivalent to what a woman has achieved. For the first half of my life, I was male."
In person, Martine is magnificent, like a tall lanky teenage boy with breasts. She wears no makeup or jewelry, and she inhabits her muted clothing—jeans, a T-shirt, a floppy button-down thrown on top—in the youthful, offhand way of the tech elite. Martine is transgender, a power trans, which makes her an even rarer species in the corporate jungle than a female CEO. And she seems genuinely to revel in her self-built in-betweenness. Just after her sex-reassignment surgery, her appearance was more feminine than it is today—old photos show her wearing lipstick, her long, curly hair loose about her shoulders. But in the years since she has developed her own unisexual style. She is a person for whom gender matters enough to have undergone radical surgery, but not enough to care whether she's called he or she by people, like her 83-year-old mother, who occasionally lose track of which pronouns to use.
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