The media and entertainment group Discovery Communications had the highest ratio of chief executive pay to median worker pay in the US. The company, which ran Shark Week on its Discovery Channel this month, had a pay ratio of 1,951 to one, with David Zaslav, the chief executive, earning $156 million in 2014 while median worker pay was $80,000.
The career website Glassdoor found that chief executives of big US companies earn on average 204 times the pay of their employees. At four companies, the ratio was more than 1,000 to one.
The survey of S&P 500 companies comes amid a public debate on income and wealth inequality and after new federal rules that will require companies to disclose their chief executive-worker pay ratio by 2017.