Too few women in Canada’s boardrooms: study

Despite great strides toward gender equality in most Canadian workplaces, corporate boardrooms remain biased against women, a recent study shows.

Catalyst, an international organization that aims to promote women in business, unveiled their most recent study, the 2009 Catalyst Census: Financial Post 500 Women Board Directors, earlier today. The census shows that in 2009, just 13% of all board directors in Canadian companies were women. This is up 1% since 2007.

According to Catalyst, this marginal increase is unacceptable, especially when coupled with the finding that 45% of Canadian public companies do not employ any women as board directors.

“Corporate Canada must recognize that, competitively, they are playing with ‘half a deck’ when they ignore the marketplace and workforce and overlook appointing women to board service,” said Deborah Gillis, Catalyst’s Vice President, North America. “In 2010, the argument that companies can’t find women to sit on boards simply doesn’t work.”

Hiring more women to head up boards does more than just promote equality in the workplace, Gillis argues. It actually increases companies’ productivity.

“Catalyst has done research that looks at the relationship between more women on boards and financial performance on Fortune 500 companies in the United States,” she said. “When we did that analysis, we found that on average, those companies that had more women directors as compared to those with the lowest number of women directors had stronger performances on several key measures such as return on sales, return on investment and capital return on equity.”

The 2009 Catalyst Census found that in Canadian public companies, women hold 10.3% of board director positions as compared to the 15.2% held by women in American Fortune 500 companies.

“One of the challenges has been that when directors or nominating committees or recruiters are looking for nominees for board directors, they have tended to look at the CEO or president pool for candidates,” said Gillis. “That’s the place where networks are the tightest and where we see the smallest number of women.”

If those looking to hire new board directors could look beyond the president pool to corporate officers, than they would find 30 times more qualified women, says Gillis.

Private companies in Canada have had the greatest increase in women board directors with 16% of positions being held by women in 2009 as compared to just 12% in 2007.

The most gender-equal boardrooms in the country can be found at companies that are owned and operated by the government. Here, 29.1% of board directors were women in 2009. However, this is down slightly from 30% in 2007.

“When you look at progress in terms of women’s advancement in business, we see here that we’ve not made the progress that we would have hoped to have seen and frankly that women have earned based on their education and their experience in the workplace,” said Gillis.

This study points to a discrepancy in gender equality in Canada just as the international community turns its attention to women’s issues.

“Certainly, the timing of this report is meant to co-inside with the celebration of International Women’s Day which will happen on Monday [March 8],” said Gillis. “We hope that [in doing so] we will raise some awareness and certainly garner some attention.”

(03/04/10)