Stalled progress for top female executives
Among TSX 60 index companies, none listed a woman as its CEO
None of Canada’s TSX 60 companies were headed by a woman and two-thirds did not include a single woman among top earners during their latest fiscal year, reveals a Canadian Press analysis of corporate Canada’s highest ranks.
Despite pressure to improve gender equality in Canadian workplaces — and a myriad of initiatives and corporate pledges to boost female representation — top-earning women continue to be paid less than their male counterparts, while the number holding the powerful management roles of chief executive officer and chief financial officer has shrunk compared to five years ago.
Among the companies on the TSX 60 index, a cross-section of the largest and most heavily traded Canadian stocks, none listed a woman as its chief executive officer in its most recent compensation disclosure. Just three had a woman as CFO. That compared to one CEO and eight CFOs in 2012.
Less than 8 per cent of the top paid management roles were held by women. Only 25 women were among a total of 312 named executive officers (NEO) — defined by regulators as a company’s most highly compensated roles — in the latest management information circulars of TSX 60 companies, which, like all Canadian public firms, are required to disclose a list of NEOs each year. The findings on NEO compensation include salaries as well as other forms of compensation such as share-based awards, incentive plans and pensions.
The Canadian Press analysis paints a bleak picture of a corporate landscape in which women remain a significant minority, and those in the upper ranks are paid an average 64 cents for every dollar earned by the average male NEO. That’s even more dismal than the average of 74 cents for every dollar of annual salary made by men among the entire working population, according to the most recent Statistics Canada data.
Over the last year, the Me Too movement, which began as a reaction to allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, has become the latest iteration of a long-standing drive for equality for women in the workplace. Many women in corporate Canada are hopeful the recent attention has sparked a broader conversation that will expose the unseen barriers women face when climbing the corporate ladder and fuel the push for gender parity, according to dozens of women in senior man- agement roles and corporate governance experts who spoke to The Canadian Press.
“I can’t remember anything in the last 15 years that has sent such strong shock waves through corporate Canada,” said Charlene Ripley, general counsel and an executive vicepresident at mining company Goldcorp Inc. “This Me Too movement has been a catalyst to shock people into awareness of so many issues, when it comes to bad culture.”
And yet, the C-suite remains a domain largely occupied by men.
The eye-opening data suggests the efforts to accelerate gender diversity haven’t yield- ed the desired results, said Camilla Sutton, president and chief executive of Women in Capital Markets.
“If you took the pulse of the nation, in terms of the change that’s happened versus the change that the data suggests, I don’t think that would be correlated at all,” she reflected on the analysis.
“The data would suggest that we’ve gone backwards, on many measures.”
The analysis also makes apparent that the long-standing gender wage gap is a problem even for women at the top of their game.
In 2017, the average total compensation for female NEOs was $3.24 million, compared to $5.08 million for men — a difference of 36 per cent. That’s a slight improvement from the 38 per cent gap in 2012.
The disparity is even wider among the earners at the very top.
The highest-paid male NEO, auto parts maker Magna International Inc.’s president and chief executive Donald Walker, received a total compensation package worth $25.54 million.