Number of women in leadership creeping up

March 9, 2022

The share of women in leadership positions in Canada is slowly rising, despite challenges with the pandemic.

Specifically, 41.2 per cent of those hired into leadership positions in 2021 were women — up from 39.4 per cent in 2020, according to a LinkedIn report drawn from anonymized and aggregated profile information of 810 million members around the world

That share has also risen steadily since 2015 to:

36.5 per cent in 2016
37.1 per cent in 2017
37.8 per cent in 2018
38.6 per cent in 2019
34.9 per cent in 2020
41.2 per cent in 2021

“Leadership positions here include those holding director-level or C-suite positions,” notes Riva Gold, senior news editor at LinkedIn.

While many organizations were hit hard by the pandemic and are “scrambling to survive,” this has caused many of them to take their eyes off the “the equity-diversity-inclusion ball,” to the detriment of women who wish to advance in their careers, says another expert.

Among 20 major global economies, Canada ranked third when it comes to the percentage of women in leadership, just behind the U.S. and Singapore (both at 36 per cent). The country is doing better in this regard than Australia (32 per cent), France (31 per cent), the U.K. (30 per cent), Germany (22 per cent) and India (18 per cent), among others.

Source: HR Reporter