Women of colour still scarce in local boardrooms,
Women of colour are 2.6% of GTA leaders
Visible minority women in Greater Toronto still have a long way to go if they want to pursue leadership roles in both the public and private sectors, a new study says.
According to the report to be released Thursday to mark the International Women’s Day, women of colour made up only 2.6 per cent of the elected officials, public sector executives and legal sector leaders, and in boardrooms of the corporate, voluntary and education sectors in the region.
While they fared much better in elected office and the education sector in the GTA, their re- presentation on corporate boards and executive seats, at 0.6 per cent, was dismal, says the report by Ryerson University’s Diversity Institute, part of a Community University Research Alliance project.
“In spite of significant resources and efforts that have been devoted to promoting diversity and inclusion in workplaces and encouraging representativeness among leaders, results have been uneven and there are substantial gaps in every sector,” the study says.
Using publicly available information, researchers examined female representation in seven sectors.
Although women accounted for 51.3 per cent of the region’s population, they made up less than one-quarter of the 4,605 leaders studied in 2011. White women had much better representation than their minority counterparts in all areas, but were still grossly underrepresented. While they made up 22.5 per cent of the executive and director roles, again, they fell short in the corpo- rate world, accounting for only 14 per cent of the senior positions in the sector. The project, dubbed DiversityLeads, aims to benchmark and assess the progress of diversity in leadership and to examine the barriers minorities face in gaining equal representation.
Of the 119 companies headquartered in Greater Toronto on the Financial Post 500, only two companies (4.3 per cent) had boards that were at least 40 per cent women, and eight (11.9 per cent) had executive teams that were at least 40 per cent female.
In contrast, 38.3 per cent of these corporate boards and one-quarter of their executives had no women at all. The report calls for: Management’s support and commitment to diversity initiatives;
Strong and transparent human resource practices in recruitment, promotion and management;
Benchmarking organizational diversity to set and achieve goals.