Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
I'm going to focus on women and leadership—that's where my expertise lies—or more specifically, the lack thereof. I have a few slides that I've put together, but first I'll just give you some context around the numbers.
If you compare us globally to OECD countries, the numbers in Canada are not good. Representation on boards today is about 12% for publicly listed companies, TSX companies. If you have the graph in front of you, you'll see that at the bottom of the graph.
You're looking at other countries that are 30% to 40%. Some of those countries have gone the route of quotas. We have not chosen that. We've chosen “comply or explain”.
They also started a lot earlier. Other countries focused on the issue of why we don't have more women in leadership a lot sooner than we did in Canada. We put the regulation into place a couple of years ago.
In the U.K., comply or explain actually worked. They've gone from 12% representation on boards in 2012 to 26% today. It can work, but we haven't seen a lot of progress. In Canada today, 45% of boards have zero women on them; another 30% have one. The executive suite looks pretty much the same. If you asked those boards why they don't have any women or how they appoint, they would say, “We appoint based on meritocracy”, which obviously implies that 45% of boards decided that they couldn't find one woman who merited a board seat.
We all know that this is just a red herring. It's ridiculous. There are plenty of very qualified women for boards in this country. If anyone needs a recommendation, they can come to me. That's not the issue. It's a demand issue. That's how we need to address it in this country, and recognize that there are lots of very qualified women.
If you look at the progress since comply or explain, it's gone up 1%. We were at 11% last year; it's 12% this year. That's just not good enough. Of the 521 seats that came up last year, only 15% were filled by women, so we're not seeing corporate Canada paying any attention to comply or explain in any broad sense.
I know Bill C-25 is coming forward, and it will mimic the same sort of disclosure that we require of publicly listed companies. Bigger companies are taking this more seriously, but they have been for a long time. They've always had better disclosure. They've always focused on these things.
Canada is an economy of smaller companies. That's the reality. We need this to be broadly taken up by companies in Canada. Often you'll get the excuse, “Well, we're a resource-heavy economy, and therefore we can't because there are no women in resources.” In Australia, they managed to go from 8% on boards in 2008 to about 23% today, so other countries that are resource-heavy economies are also making progress. We certainly can in Canada as well.
Here are a couple more quick statistics on the whole board issue.
Part of the issue is that you need to have policies: do you care? Are you looking at it? Only 21% have any sort of policy around gender diversity.
The second thing is that you have to have targets. Any business in Canada has targets around its objectives. For people in Canada and the corporate world, if you say “targets”, it computes in their heads immediately as “quotas”. It's not a quota. It's a target. We always put metrics around things, and companies need to do this. We need to start thinking about that. It's not good enough for companies to just say, “We don't have a policy. We don't have targets.” We need to ask more of Canadian corporations.
The key issue here is, why should you care? Obviously, there is a social justice element here, but there is a business case. Much research has been done. I'm sure people around this table have read it, so I won't go over it all. Canada needs to care because our economy will be stronger. Our businesses will be stronger.
We're leaving half the talent pool sitting around. Women have been over 50% of the university graduates for 25 years now, and today it's 62%. We earn 50% of master's degrees, and Ph.D.s now too. All that talent is just going away. We're close to 50% of the workforce and about 35% of middle management, and have been for a couple of decades—in the U.S., women are 50% of middle management—and yet, if you look at senior officer roles, you see 18%. The numbers aren't budging. They haven't moved in a long time. We need to make sure that those numbers start moving, because that talent is just wasting away at the mid-level.
There are different ways you can get at this problem. I think too often we decide that it's the baby issue. That's what I hear from senior leaders all the time: it's just the babies. Absolutely, that's an element of the problem, but it's not just about the babies. There are all kinds of structural barriers in the corporate world today that make it difficult for women to advance.
Thankfully, I'm in an industry that, if you look at the broader financial sector, is looking at this problem very carefully. They've done some good work. A couple of the financial institutions now are at about 40% in terms of the representation of women. You can do it. That's my point. It can be done. Companies are doing a better job today and making progress on this, but it takes very formal talent management. I can go into the different types of policies if people are interested in what companies are doing and best practices, but I'll leave that for now, unless there are questions on it.
In particular what we need here is transparency. If you're thinking about what can you do from a public perspective, we need to encourage transparency. This comply-or-explain approach also needs some support behind it.
In the U.K. the reason it was successful is the government put in place a review called the Lord Davies' report every year, and it really was a review on pushing.... First of all, they went around and they got stakeholder engagement from the corporate world broadly—chairmen, senior leaders—and from the public sector to say they needed to focus on this, since it's a business issue. They published their report every year. There was a bit of a shaming game involved there, too. They put the list of people who were doing nothing out there, and you have to do it. I've been told it's un-Canadian to be shaming people like that, but, you know, we need to do it.
It also provided best practices, and it provided that report card every year to say how they were doing. That's why we saw real progress there, I believe, along with a few other entities like the 30% club that were pushing. We need that. The feeling generally in comply or explain is there's a frustration there, so we need more behind it.
Thank you.