Confirming the CEO findings, 13 of the 15 other senior management positions surveyed also reported falling incomes this year.

Damien Smith, Managing Director of Enterprise Care, believes that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the uncertainty it brought for the immediate future has played a large part in this across the board decline.

“In the eleven years we have been conducting this survey we have only once seen CEO remuneration fall – that was in the year 2000. There is no doubt that the GFC has led to organisations battening down their hatches, which has played a significant role in this drop,” Smith said.

“Anecdotally we can report some CEOs and senior managers have taken pay cuts to keep their organisations afloat. Falling bonuses, some reductions in benefits and declining professional development funding have also been major factors in these dwindling incomes,” he said.

However, while remuneration has fallen on average for the majority of not-for-profit executives, Smith believes there is some good news out of the report.

“Female CEOs managed to claw back some of the ground lost in 2008, gaining three per cent on the male/female remuneration gap,” Smith said.

“The report shows that female CEOs now earn 82.3 per cent of their male counterpart incomes, which is a gain on 2008, but still well below the record high of nearly 87 per cent in 2004.”

“There is no doubt that in Australia, as with the rest of the world, the gender gap is significant in terms of remuneration. The figures this year show a small glimmer of hope for female CEOs making ground on their male counterparts, and it would be wonderful to see another gain next year,” Smith said.

However, 2009 was not a good year for females in other management positions. Fourteen of the fifteen other senior management positions surveyed reported males earning higher incomes than females, with Publications Director/Manager being the only position where women earned more than men.

“In two of the surveyed positions, females were earning a staggeringly low 72 per cent and 73 per cent of their male counterpart’s income. Obviously we still have a long way to go in gaining genuine equality in salaries. This disparity needs to be addressed, not only within the not-for-profit sector, but in all parts of the Australian workforce,” Smith said.