Corporate Canada is still a boys’ club, data analysis shows – and COVID-19 could make it more so

The dearth of women in Canada’s C-suites has been a concern for decades, and yet few companies are willing to do anything about it – even when evidence shows female leadership is good for the bottom line.

Data analysis of top executives at Canada’s largest publicly traded corporations, compiled by The Globe and Mail, shows just 4 per cent of companies on the benchmark stock index have a female chief executive officer.

That equates to nine women in the role out of 223 companies, as of November.

Among more than 1,000 named executive officers at firms listed on the S&P/TSX Composite Index, a scant 13 per cent are women, the data show.

And more than half of the companies on the composite index – which account for 73 per cent of the total market capitalization on the Toronto Stock Exchange – have zero top executives who are women.

It’s just shocking,” says Maureen Jensen, the former chair and CEO of the Ontario Securities Commission, who has spent years nudging companies to put more women in leadership roles.

Canada has never had a female Bank of Canada governor.

Just one of the five chief economists is a woman: TD’s Beata Caranci.

At the country’s top think tanks, only one – the Conference Board of Canada – is run by a woman.

As part of a sweeping look at women in the workplace, The Globe gathered data from companies and proxy circulars filed in 2020 to get a current picture of diversity in corporate leadership.

In the public sector, a Globe analysis of publicly available salary records for tens of thousands of employees at municipal departments, provincial ministries, universities and taxpayer-funded companies found there are more men earning top salaries, more men on executive teams and more men running organizations.

The private-sector data show that as of November, 2020, of a total of 1,049 NEOs at companies listed on Canada’s benchmark index, just 136 of them were women.

Black women, Indigenous women and women of colour, meanwhile, hold just a handful of executive roles.

The proportion of female executive officers has remained largely unchanged since 2015, notes Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt in a recent report, which means younger women and girls still don’t see themselves reflected at the top of corporate Canada.

Though it has since largely recovered (for now), there are other troubling signs: Women in two age cohorts – those in their early 20s and late 30s – are leaving the work force, notes RBC deputy chief economist Dawn Desjardins, while women still on the job have seen their hours worked tumble more than among men.

A recent McKinsey study of U.S.-based companies found more than one in four women are contemplating leaving the work force or reducing their hours.

With so many women considering leaving the work force, “regardless of where they are in the pipeline, we’ll end up with far fewer women in leadership.”.

As policy-makers grapple with a health crisis that’s crippling the economy, ensuring women return to work, climb the ranks and reach their full potential isn’t just in their interest; it supports families, communities and the economy as a whole.

Addressing gender equality in Canada could add $150-billion in GDP in 2026, according to McKinsey – the equivalent of adding an entire new financial services sector to the country’s economy.

(The program was suspended last year due to COVID-19 but will resume in 2021.) France has mandated that at least 40 per cent of directors on corporate boards are women.

Evidence shows that putting more women in leadership roles – both on boards and in the C-suite – spurs innovation, improves risk assessments, bolsters decision-making and resilience, and can ultimately boost financial performance.

On a broader scale, more women at work will be crucial to driving Canada’s economic recovery.

It was heralded as a bold, innovative measure back in 2015: Canadian companies would have to disclose information about gender diversity – including the number of women on their boards – or explain why they’re not doing so.

“What really surprised me is the number of people who actually wrote me from their own e-mails telling me I should get out of my job and let a man run with the position.”.

So this is broader than just men and women; this is about having a club where you don’t let anyone who doesn’t think like you in.

Even so, as the OSC began to collect and publish comply-or-explain information each year, “it just went very slow.

Many of the explanations provided by companies for why no women were included contained the same exact wording: Our decisions are strictly merit-based.

Between 2015 and 2019, the percentage of women on the boards of S&P/TSX Composite Index companies did improve – to 28 per cent from 18 per cent, according to Catalyst, an organization that works to advance women in the workplace.

The number in executive roles, however, barely budged – 18 per cent in 2019 compared with 15 per cent in 2015.

The dearth of women in corporate Canada has been a concern for ages.

Half a century ago, a groundbreaking Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada report found women held fewer than 1 per cent of the top corporate positions in Canada.

Of the 405 vacant board positions in 2020, women were nominated to fill just 35 per cent of them – a declining share from a year earlier, according to Osler.

This, despite the fact that thousands of women are qualified to sit on boards in Canada, according to the Institute of Corporate Directors, which has 5,930 female members.

The vast majority of companies – 93 per cent, says Osler – still don’t even have targets for female executive officers.

The Globe contacted four companies that have zero women as named executive officers, zero women on their boards and no targets in their proxy circular disclosures.

Toronto-based Apollo’s 2020 proxy circular says the company (called Acasta at the time of its May filing) “does not presently have, nor does it intend to establish, a target regarding the number of women in executive officer or senior leadership positions.”.

Gamehost’s 2020 disclosure states that the board “has not adopted a specific policy relating to the identification and nomination of women directors, does not consider the level of representation of women on the board in identifying and nominating candidates for election or re-election to the board, does not consider level of representation of women in executive officer positions when making executive officer appointments, and has not adopted targets regarding women on Gamehost’s board or in its executive officer positions.”.

Laura Falby, the company’s newly hired senior director of people and culture, says the Ontario craft brewer does have women in senior roles, including a brewing director and a maintenance supervisor, and aims to diversify its leadership – though targets can be too confining.

Jensen is among those who’d like to see governments and regulators require that companies set diversity targets for boards and executives.

Citing “underrepresentation in positions of influence,” the last federal budget introduced a “challenge” for companies to lift the share of women to 50 per cent in senior management and to 30 per cent for other groups, including racialized Canadians, Indigenous people and people with disabilities.

“Many times, there might have been an opportunity to do some kind of business trip that involves golf or fishing, or some kind of networking, and women just weren’t included.

At the annual Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada mining conference in Toronto, she recalls sitting at a dinner next to a CFO who asked if she was a “booth babe,” referring to a time when some mining suppliers and exploration firms hired young, attractive women to sit in their booths.

Just 14.7 per cent of CFOs are women.

The Globe was able to identify just one Indigenous NEO at the top 223 listed companies out of 1,000-plus executives, and one CEO who is a woman of colour.

Among financial services companies listed on the benchmark index, fewer than 10 per cent of top execs are women, while among the Big Five banks, just two of 25 NEOs are women.

“People are recognizing that there’s so many structural barriers that stop women and racialized people from progressing into those roles that targets or quotas are a way to balance that as we work to bring down the structural barriers,” says Camilla Sutton, former president and CEO of Women in Capital Markets.

“It’s going to take us years of real work to be able to bring those barriers down.

Quotas are increasingly common outside of Canada.

France and Norway have long had quotas for gender diversity on boards, and in Germany, the government is now introducing quotas after years of voluntary steps to improve gender inequality did not work

BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, is ratcheting up pressure on companies to put more women in executive roles

So is the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the country’s largest pension fund, saying more diverse senior management teams make better decisions

More experts are pressing for mandatory measures to make sure the corporate giants of Canada get women into positions of power

Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail

As RBC’s Dawn Desjardins notes, women are exiting the work force at a higher rate than men, with the participation rate for women 15 years and older at its lowest level since 2002

In the banking world, a survey by Women in Capital Markets released in July found women are cutting back on their hours, taking leaves of absence and saying no to work opportunities

All told, 9 per cent of women in capital markets are considering quitting their jobs due to the impact of COVID-19

That kind of exodus, says Camilla Sutton, means “we’ve just set ourselves back two decades

It would just be such a loss for the industry.” Women who leave the sector typically don’t come back, she adds

Men and women are typically equally represented in entry-level positions, but the number of women dwindles the further up the ladder they go, according to a 2019 McKinsey study

Three-quarters of T&T's C-suite executives are women

Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

“It’s pretty obvious there is a true lack of diversity at the most senior roles in corporate Canada.”

Three-quarters of the company’s C-suite executives are women, along with 40 per cent of its senior managers and 43 per cent of the directors on its board

Linda Seymour, CEO of HSBC Bank Canada, says it's 'detrimental to your business not to have a diverse work force.'

Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

Some CEOs openly support targets for women in executive roles

At HSBC Bank Canada, the country’s seventh-largest bank, 60 per cent of senior executives are women, including its recently named president and CEO, Linda Seymour

“And we can’t just keep talking about this

“So it’s actually detrimental to your business not to have a diverse work force.”

In Vancouver, Eldorado Gold has adopted targets both for directors and executives

Its goal is to have 30 per cent women in senior management by 2022

It’s also making a conscious effort to bring more women into its work force – not just in Canada, but wherever it operates

Images of 224 chief executive officers (and CEO-equivalents) at companies listed on Canada’s S&P/TSX Composite Index shows, as of Nov

There are more CEOs at these companies named Michael than there are women

Source: Company handouts/social media, LinkedIn, Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail, Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press, Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail, Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail, Aaron Harris/Reuters, Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail, Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Globe and Mail, Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail, Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press, Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail, Chris Bolin/The Globe and Mail

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