New figures from Statistics Canada reveals representation has only increased marginally across Canadian boardrooms
Gender parity among Canadian management boards is still a long way off according to new figures, although financial services does better than most other industries.
Statistics Canada data published this week shows that women made up just 20% of almost 18,000 director and officer positions in 2020, just 0.3 percentage points higher than in 2019.
The survey included publicly-traded corporations, privately held corporations and government business enterprises operating across a variety of industries in Canada.
It found that 60% of boards did not have any female members, 28% had one, and 12% had two or more.
Financial services had the second highest share of women directors among industries at 27%, ahead of utilities (25%), and transportation and warehousing (23%).
Although educational services had 50% of women directors on its boards – the only industry to achieve gender parity – this was based on just 30 seats, the lowest in the survey.
Government entities continued to lead overall with 35% of its board seats occupied by women.
Women officers
There was a slightly better showing for women in officer roles across Canadian corporations.
A rise of 0.8 percentage points year-over-year took the share of officer roles held by women to 31% in 2020.
However, this falls to 24% for senior officer roles compared to 36% for other officer roles.
Women in top officer roles were most likely to be executive vice presidents (28%) but least likely to be a chairperson (1.3%).
Representation of women as directors of private enterprises was lower than other corporation types, but at 32%, the share of women in officer roles at these firms was higher in 2020 than for publicly-traded corporations (28%) and government business enterprises (30%).
