Highest Paid Female in America

Everything CEO
Futurist, pharma tycoon, satellite
entrepreneur, philosopher. Martine
Rothblatt, the highest-paid female executive
in America, was born male. But that is far
from the thing that defines her. Just ask her
wife. Then ask the robot version of her wife.

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 $18 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 a 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, about 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,” she said.
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—cargo
pants, 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 in 1994, 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 pronoun to use.
What she prefers to be called is
“Martine.” To her four young
grandchildren she is “Grand Martine.”
Bina Aspen, the woman who married
Martine 33 years ago, when Martine was
a man, and remains her devoted wife,
calls herself not straight or gay but
“Martine-sexual”—as in the only person
she wants to have sex with is Martine.
Together Martine and Bina have four
children, and they refer to Martine as
“Martine” in conversations with
strangers. At home, they call her “Dad.”
In 1995, just after her transition,
Martine published The Apartheid of Sex ,
a slim manifesto that insisted on an
overhaul of “dimorphic” (her word)
gender categories. “There are five billion
people in the world and five billion
unique sexual identities,” she wrote.
“Genitals are as irrelevant to one’s role
in society as skin tone. Hence, the legal
division of people into males and
females is as wrong as the legal division
of people into black and white races.”
Instead, she suggested, people might
better express their gender and sexual
identities on a spectrum, perhaps in
terms of color: Green might be  (lime green
someone a little less aggressive), and
purple someone gentle, nourishing, and
erotic in equal measure. Source- nymag.com