September 26, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
The highest paid female executive in America, Martine Rothblatt, the chief executive of biotech United Therapeutics Corporation , used to be a man, news sources have been reporting this month amid a wave of international discussion about what it means to be transgender.
Rothblatt made $38 million last year as the head of United, a firm she founded to find a treatment for pulmonary hypertension after her daughter was diagnosed with the disease.
She has never hidden her transition, made fully in 1994, but a recent profile in New York Magazine has brought it to the forefront of discussion in the biotech industry.
Rothblatt, a 59 year old entrepreneur and space lawyer, has her compensation directly tied to United’ stock performance--a valuation that shot up sharply in 2013 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved intravenous prostacyclin, a therapy used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Rothblatt named the drug Orenitram, Martine Ro,” or part of her name spelled backwards. PAH causes constriction of the arteries that carry blood from the heart to the lungs and is accompanied by fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain and heart failure.
After the FDA move, the stock more than doubled and Rothblatt’s compensation rose by a multiple of four. “I think this [pay structure] is in the best interest of the shareholders,” she says. “There’s a mantra about corporate governance about pay-for-performance so I said ‘okay I’ll take the risk that 100% of my bonus compensation will be based upon stock market performance.’”
Rothblatt has now simultaneously joined the debate about pay disparity in corporate America, where women still earn only 78.3 cents for every dollar men make at the same professional level, and the issue of how transgender people are treated in the mainstream.
Even among CEOs, the median pay is $1.6 million less for women than their male counterparts.
Corporate America is now revisiting her 11995 book “The Apartheid of Sex,” written after her transition, that suggested 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 may identify themselves on a spectrum, even a color spectrum. “Green might be “an equally aggressive/nurturing person who does not try to appear sexy” (lime green someone a little less aggressive), and purple someone gentle, nourishing, and erotic in equal measure.
