Women Lead Here: Corporate Canada female leadership ranked

Our fourth annual benchmark of gender diversity in corporate Canada celebrates 90 companies with an average of 46% women in executive roles. That’s progress. But only 6.6% of Canada’s largest publicly traded companies have a woman at the top (up one measly percentage point from 2020), and at the rate we’re going, we won’t reach top-level parity for another four decades. To put it bluntly, we’re not moving nearly fast enough. Here’s how to fix it.

METHODOLOGY To create the 2023 Women Lead Here list, Report on Business magazine assessed approximately 500 publicly traded companies in Canada with annual revenues greater than $50 million. Companies were evaluated from November to December 2022 on their executive teams. Our researchers evaluated each company’s top three tiers of executive leadership, while measuring the ratio of female-identifying to male-identifying individuals at each tier. Tier 1 is CEO or equivalent; Tier 2 is C-suite, president or equivalent; and Tier 3 is generally EVP, SVP or equivalent. In the assessment process, we contacted each company by email to confirm the data’s accuracy. We then applied a weighted methodology, considering the company’s profitability, revenue growth and three-year return. The diversity of an executive team was also considered, as was the year-over-year comparison of female representation in the executive ranks. We then assigned each company a score and applied a final screen to the top quintile: Companies with fewer than 30% of overall executive roles held by women were excluded, as were companies with only one woman-identifying executive. Research by Fiona Collie, Liza Agrba and Allan Tong