Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
Thank you for according me the honour of speaking with you this morning to share my observations on improving gender diversity.
I'm a partner at the law firm of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. We are a national corporate law firm with offices in Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver.
We have a proud history of leadership in gender diversity at our firm. Osler was the first large corporate law firm in Canada to admit a woman as a partner, and that partner, Bertha Wilson, went on to become the first female justice appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. Only a few years ago, another female partner of our firm, Suzanne Côté, joined the Supreme Court of Canada. Our firm has a female co-managing partner and has had one continuously for 20 years, and one of the co-chairs of our firm is a woman.
That being said, we need to do more. Although 47% of our associates are now women, only 26% of our partners are female.
I lead the Osler corporate governance practice, advising boards, in-house counsel, and others on directors' duties and liabilities, stakeholder engagement, disclosure, and other governance matters. My long-standing interest in corporate governance is reflected first in my involvement as a staff member of the Toronto Stock Exchange committee on corporate governance, also known as the Dey committee. Then, I've been a member of the risk oversight and governance board of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants and now am a member of the American College of Governance Counsel.
I am not, however, an expert on the arts. My focus has been on the governance of publicly traded companies. For the last three years, I have led our firm's annual review of Canadian public company disclosure of diversity. Copies of our most recent report were distributed to the committee earlier this week.
Osler is very proud of this industry-leading report. It summarizes the progress made in increasing the representation of women on publicly traded boards and in executive officer roles. It also summarizes legal and non-legal diversity developments affecting public companies and it highlights best practices adopted by companies to improve their gender diversity.
Although our work has focused on public company diversity, there are a number of lessons learned from this work that may inform the work of this committee, and I would like to share five of them with you today.
First, gathering information is a necessary first step. It is said that if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. Numbers provide a useful starting point for discussion. In addition, as highlighted in our report, results vary greatly between organizations based on size and industry, and I would expect similar variations among arts organizations, based on size and geography. It is important to understand these variations in order to better assess the burden of different policy initiatives on differently situated organizations.
One way to gather information is to require an organization seeking funding to report on their diversity and on their initiative to improve the representation of women in the organization. Recently, Toronto City Council asked staff to come up with a mechanism to collect information on the gender diversity of corporate boards of entities doing business with the city. Last year, the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion of the Securities Exchange Commission in the United States released a diversity assessment report designed to help regulated entities conduct self-assessments of their diversity policies and practices and to serve as a template for submitting information about their self-assessments.
Second, below the board level it is hard to identify an appropriate measure for assessing the representation of women in senior leadership roles. The Canadian Securities Administrators requires disclosure of the number of executive officers of the company, including all major subsidies of the company, who are women. However, the number of executive officers at any public company varies wildly, from a handful to as many as 211, making comparison very difficult. A better focus might be to identify the proportion of women among the 10 most highly compensated employees at the organization.
Third, it is important to provide concrete tools to initiate a meaningful discussion of diversity at the board level. I created, with the support of the Institute of Corporate Directors, a free, customizable, downloadable board diversity policy template to quickly generate a form of diversity policy for any organization. Its purpose was to provide a focus for a board discussion of the need to increase gender diversity, and last year we noted some progress in diversity policy adoption rates, with 47% of companies disclosing that they had adopted a written diversity policy. The Canadian Securities Administrators have noted that there is a greater likelihood of a company adding a woman to the board if the company has previously adopted a written board diversity policy.
Fourth, while academic literature supporting the benefits of increased gender diversity is helpful, it is important that those who fund artistic endeavours actively advocate for greater diversity. In our second annual report, we noted the lack of any improvement in results year over year. However, institutional investors began, in late 2016 and early 2017, publicly to express interest in diversity, and it had an impact on companies, resulting in a significant drop in all-male boards of directors and an increase in an overall percentage of board seats held by women. Boards in the arts community are more likely to take positive action to improve the representation of women in the organization if their sources of funding publicly advocate for change.
Fifth, there is a need for more guidance on best practices for advancing women in senior roles in organizations. In our report, we highlighted such best practices as improving recruitment criteria for identifying potential candidates; training programs on best practices and identification of unconscious bias; the use of mentorship programs to develop high-potential leaders; networking programs, both internal and external, to provide support and sharing of ideas; the establishment of diversity and inclusion committees; workplace practices to better retain high-potential women; and continued monitoring of progress of women in leadership roles within the organization.
I'd like to make one final comment. There is a need to improve gender diversity in leadership roles, and that is a worthy goal, but there's also a need to improve in other diversity characteristics. For example, last October, Statistics Canada reported that visible minorities make up 22.3% of the Canadian population, yet according to 2016 data from the Canadian Board Diversity Council, only 4.5% of directors of Financial Post 500 companies are from visible minorities. I hope that what is learned from focusing on gender diversity will have a wider application.
Thank you.