June 1, 2023
Statistics Canada is releasing new data on the gender composition of leadership and strategic decision-making roles within publicly traded corporations, privately held corporations and government business enterprises operating across a variety of industries in Canada.
This release includes data on 2019 and 2020 and offers a snapshot of the representation of women in director and officer positions during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic had a significant impact on women’s employment, with women accounting for more than half of the year-over-year employment losses recorded from March 2020 to February 2021. Despite these setbacks, modest increases in the representation of women in executive positions were recorded from 2019 to 2020.
In 2020, women occupied just over one-fifth (20.5%) of the 17,996 seats on boards of directors, edging up 0.3 percentage points over the proportion of women recorded in 2019.
The majority of boards of directors did not have any women directors: 59.7% of the 5,810 boards of directors included in the dataset were only composed of men. Over one-quarter (28.0%) of boards of directors had one woman director, while boards of directors with two or more women directors represented 12.3% of the dataset.
