Women’s presence on Alberta boards growing, but parity still distant, regulators say

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Women are having a growing presence on the boards of Alberta’s publicly-traded companies, though they still make little more than a quarter of representation of companies’ leadership teams.

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But it marks a substantial improvement compared to a decade ago, when women held just eight per cent of board positions in Alberta.

The findings come from the Canadian Securities Administrators and Alberta Securities Commission’s (ASC) 10-year review of representation on the boards of publicly-traded companies, released Wednesday, which concluded this year after booting up in 2015.

“We’ve talked about this for as long as I can remember,” said Deborah Yedlin, president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. “Throughout my professional life, this has been a consistent question at every organization and every industry that I’ve either worked at or written about … It’s better, absolutely — but is it where it should be? We’re not there yet.”

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According to disclosures from 115 Alberta-based companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) ending on March 31 this year, women hold 27 per cent of board positions in Alberta — up two percentage points from 2023, and a bold jump from eight per cent in 2015, when the decade-long review began.

Among those companies, 84 per cent have one or more women on their board. In 2015, that number was 46 per cent.

Meanwhile, 68 per cent of companies reported having at least one woman in executive officer positions, a single percentage point less than last year.

However, only five per cent of companies had a woman in the CEO’s chair, a number that has stayed flat during the 10-year review.

“While there’s been progress around gender diversity on leadership teams and on boards, more broadly, that CEO role still remains an evasive position to be achieved by women,” said Nuvyn Peters, CEO of Axis Connects, a Calgary non-profit dedicated to advancing women in the business community.

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Gender parity is also slightly stronger among Alberta’s largest companies, according to the review.

Among Alberta-based companies on the TSX 60 Index — a stock market index of 60 large Canadian companies on the TSX including Calgary-based Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and other large oil-and-gas companies — 34 per cent of board positions are held by women, and 100 per cent have two or more women on their board.

Over the 10-year review the oil and gas sector, which once saw 40 per cent of companies have a woman on their board, has grown that figure to 91 per cent.

Even so, men still dominate the higher ranks of Alberta’s largest companies, exhibited by executive compensation records for 2023. In a study of executive compensation undertaken by Postmedia with Global Governance Advisors earlier in 2024, a ranking of the highest-paid executives was dominated by men, with only a small handful of women included in the 100 top-paid named executive officers.

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Women in management positions still make just 81 cents for every dollar a man earns in Alberta, a study from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce found earlier this year — making the province one of Canada’s worst performers when it comes to wage parity. (That disparity was worse in retail, trades and transportation, among other industries.)

Ascending to the highest ranks in a company is still less appealing for women who, despite shifting norms around who stays home with children, often find managing their personal and professional lives a significant challenge, Yedlin said.

“When you look at Alberta, it’s even more complicated … We have these male-heavy industries and sectors that have not historically been hospitable for women,” Yedlin said.

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Alberta’s numbers lag slightly behind women’s representation on board across Canada, at 29 per cent overall. Women held 11 per cent of board positions in the country at the beginning of the review, compared to Alberta’s eight per cent.

Companies are also making efforts to fill vacancies with women: 43 per cent of vacancies in 2024 were filled by women. Five years prior, in 2019, women filled 33 per cent of vacancies.

Since 2015, TSX-listed companies in Alberta have been required by the CSA to disclose gender diversity on their boards and in executive office positions. In December 2016, the ASC adopted amendments to the rules and began requiring non-venture reporting issuers in Alberta to also disclose representation of women on their boards.

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Yedlin said the growth in women’s representation on Canadian and Alberta boards is largely owed to a movement toward “comply-or-explain” regulations, started in Ontario in 2014, which required companies to disclose the number of women on their boards and policies in place to increase diversity within their ranks. The ASC backed the regulations in 2016.

CSA said it expects 2024 will be the final year it conducts the review, though it said it’s exploring “potential changes to diversity-related disclosure requirements.” It has been seeking feedback since spring of 2023 and is working towards a harmonized national disclosure framework, it said.

“We need to know where companies stand (and) whether gender diversity policies exist within their organizations,” Peters said.

mscace@postmedia.com
X: @mattscace67

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