I want, oh so deeply, to be shocked. But I'm not. Here's the thing: women are powerful! Women are amazing! Women are reaching the upper echelons of corporate America! Hurray! And while I'm sure everyone at NOW threw a soda party when Indra Nooyi took over as CEO of PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP), I'm sure they also tried to get mad about today's "news": male executives make way more than female executives. And then I imagine they remembered: this is nothing new. This is nothing surprising.

Women have been making less than men since the dawn of time. And although Oprah and Indra and Meg are so darned powerful, they can hardly sway the enormity of gender history in a few decades of exerting their collective feminine force.

Let's try one reason female CEOs, CFOs and the like make pocket change compared to their male brethren (and no, there seems to be no relation between executive pay and corporate profit, sales, stock performance, or how many pageviews your bio on the corporate homepage got this year): there just aren't as many of them. Naturally that doesn't explain why (for instance) the top-paid female executive, Safra Catz -- president and CFO Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) -- made a sad 36% of what the top-paid male executive made (that's Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries Ltd. (NYSE:NBR), for the record). Catz wasn't even the highest-paid executive at her own company, pulling in about half of what founder and CEO Larry Ellison scored.

Well. That is Larry Ellison after all. His ego has to be worth at least as much as three women executives put together.

Google continues to demonstrate its particular brand of goofy-yet-financially sound thinking, as the company indicated in a proxy filing yesterday. CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will collect $1 in salary for 2006, just as they did for 2005. According to the filing, "Their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google. As significant stockholders, their personal wealth is tied directly to sustained stock price appreciation and performance, which provides direct alignment with stockholder interests."

(On a multiples basis, however, they might have the highest bonuses anywhere; Brin was paid $1,723 in bonus, with Schmidt and Page collecting a tidy $1,630, over 1600 times their annual salaries!)

Google also announced that the company intends to forgo dividends to its shareholders "in the foreseeable future."