3 Practical Steps to Increase Gender Diversity at Your Company

In 2016 women held only 21.6% of board seats in Canada’s largest corporations by revenue, according to the Canadian Board Diversity Council.

While this is an improvement from 2015’s 19.5%, many companies still appear to be lagging behind adding women to their boards. A 2016 survey by the Ontario Securities Commission found that 45% of issuers did not have any women on their boards. Something needs to change.

Why the Board Matters

A company’s board hires and fires the CEO, signs off on major strategy, and oversees risk. When everyone around that table has similar backgrounds, the same blind spots get repeated in the decisions that matter most.

Boards also shape everything below them. They set expectations for the executive team, and senior leaders tend to hire people they know and trust. A board that looks beyond its usual networks sends a signal, and often a practical push, all the way down the organization.

A Talent Platform for Board-Ready Women

Enter theBoardlist, a talent platform that engages the tech community to increase gender diversity on boards. Launched in the U.S. in 2015, theBoardlist currently has over 1600 board-ready women. For the past six months, I have relentlessly worked closely with founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy and the team to support the expansion of theBoardlist to Canada.

If you know a board that needs more women check out theBoardlist to see how it can help. If you know a highly qualified woman who would be an asset to a board, why not nominate her right now.

Three Practical Steps

If your company needs more gender diversity at all levels, you’re not alone. While working with companies of all sizes, I’ve learned these three steps can make a significant difference:

1. Visit community colleges to find potential employees instead of Ivy League schools.
2. When looking to fill a position at your company, demand that your HR department or staffing firm show you at least 50% female candidates for the role.
3. Be a voice for change by calling attention to the number of women at every meeting. When numbers are low, relentlessly ask what can be done to improve it.

Each of these works on a different part of the problem. Looking beyond the usual schools widens the pool before anyone is interviewed. Insisting on a balanced shortlist stops the pool from narrowing again at the screening stage, which is where many hiring processes quietly lose women. And counting who’s in the room keeps the issue visible, so it doesn’t fade once the first round of good intentions is over.

What’s Changed Since 2017

There’s been real progress, though it’s been slow. The Canadian Securities Administrators have reviewed gender diversity disclosures every year since 2015, and their tenth review, released in 2024, covered 574 issuers. It found that women held 29% of director positions, up from 27% the year before and 11% in 2015. Ninety percent of issuers had at least one woman on their board, compared with 49% in 2015.

The review also backs up the idea that deliberate steps work. Issuers that had adopted targets for women on their boards averaged 35% of board seats held by women, compared with 22% for issuers without targets. But the top of the executive ladder has barely moved: only 5% of issuers had a female CEO, and 16% had a female CFO.

TheBoardlist itself changed hands. In August 2023, Fortune reported that Singh Cassidy and her team had sold theBoardlist to board platform BoardProspects for an undisclosed sum. By then, theBoardlist had grown to a freemium platform with 48,000 members, and Singh Cassidy was CEO of accounting software company Xero while remaining theBoardlist’s chair.

What It Means for Your Company

The numbers since 2017 show two things at once. Board seats held by women have more than doubled since 2015 across the companies the CSA reviews, and setting a clear target is linked to much better results. Yet women in the CEO’s chair are still rare, which suggests the pipeline below the board needs as much attention as the board itself.

For leaders, the three steps above remain a good place to start, because they work on that pipeline. Add one more: put a number on what you’re aiming for and check it regularly. The companies that measure progress are, on the evidence, the ones that make it.