Meritz Securities: top pay, 2.18x gender gap

On 2 September, CEOScore reported that ten of Korea’s large companies posted H1 2026 average employee pay above ₩100 million — Korea Investment Holdings topped the list at ₩184.0 million. We went to the same source, the companies’ own DART half-year filings, and asked one question the ranking didn’t answer: average pay for whom?

The same filings, split by gender

Small headcount — see note below. Source: DART half-year filings (empSttus), 2026, re-pulled by SeoulMarkets.

We checked our own numbers before printing them

Before splitting anything by gender, we confirmed our pull matched the reported ranking: our recomputed company-wide averages landed within roughly 1% of CEOScore’s nine reproducible figures (Mirae Asset Securities’ filing did not return under our query, so it’s left out rather than guessed). That match is the point of doing this at all — a public ranking is only as useful as the primary filing behind it, and here the primary filing is open to anyone with a DART API key.

What the headline number was hiding

Every one of the nine companies with a large-enough sample shows the same shape: men’s average pay is higher than women’s, by a factor of 1.31 at the smallest gap (NH Investment & Securities) to 2.18 at the largest (Meritz Securities). A “₩100 million average” headline, read without this split, reads as if it describes a typical employee. At Meritz Securities, ₩203.5 million is closer to describing a typical man; the average woman there earned ₩93.3 million — under half.

The one company that runs the other way, Meritz Financial Group, is worth reading carefully rather than as a counter-example: 28 men and 9 women is small enough that a handful of senior hires or departures can flip the average in either direction in a single half-year. We show it because we don’t drop inconvenient rows, not because it carries the same weight as SK hynix’s 24,238-to-11,912 comparison.

What this can’t tell you

A company-wide gender average mixes everyone — a new graduate hire and a 20-year managing director, both counted the same way. It cannot say whether the gap comes from fewer women in senior, higher-paid roles, from tenure differences, or from something else — DART’s disclosure doesn’t break pay down by role or seniority, only by gender and by employment type. What it can say, precisely, is what these nine companies’ own half-year filings report: a gap exists, at every reproducible one of them, and none of it appeared in the ranking that made headlines this week.

This is not investment advice, and it is not a claim about intent at any of these nine companies — it reports a dimension of a public disclosure that the original coverage did not include.

The debate

Should a “highest average pay” ranking be required to report the gender split alongside the headline number — or does a company-wide average serve its purpose (comparing employers, not individuals) without it? What do you think? This is a talking point, not a verdict — argue it out below.