Postcards

How the power players do it - by Fortune senior editor at large Patricia Sellers

Beware the pay gap!

June 26, 2008: 5:33 PM ET

Tonight's CNBC documentary hosted by David Faber, Untold Wealth: the Rise of the Super Rich, talks about the widening gap between "haves" and "have-nots" in America. In 1985, there were only 13 billionaires in the U.S. Today there are more than 1,000, and hundreds of thousands of multi-millionaires.

This calls to mind a conversation that Pattie Sellers (Postcards' main author) and I had yesterday with a well-known chief executive. We were chatting about young people taking jobs on Wall Street and with hedge funds for ridiculously big paychecks and horrendous working hours - when, if you'd get these young workers into a confession booth, they'd tell you that they'd rather be working normal hours in a different industry. "It's the spread!The spread! It's bigger than ever," this CEO told us.

"The spread" is one version of the gap between rich and poor. It's the ever-widening pay difference that is luring more and more recent grads into jobs that don't satisfy. It's the junior version of the upper-echelon gap that Faber details on his show. Faber says that today if two students graduate from an Ivy League school and one becomes a top neurosurgeon while the other becomes one of the top 25 hedge fund managers, there will be a 1,000 percent difference in their incomes.

Do you think that one consequence of the spread is rising turnover in corporate America? Coincidentally, we're hearing a lot lately about billionaire marriages unwinding due to couples disagreeing about how to indulge their children - or not. "The spread" is causing dysfunction all around! - Jessica Shambora

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About This Author
Pattie Sellers
Patricia Sellers
Senior Editor at Large, Fortune
Executive Director of MPW/Live Content, Time Inc.

Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.

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