2008 Catalyst - Census of Women Corporate Officers and Top Earners of the Fortune 500

December 2008 - Laura Jenner, Rhonda Ferguson - Catalyst

In today’s economy, business leaders must focus not only on overcoming short-term challenges but also on leveraging long-term business opportunities to gain and maintain competitive advantage.
In corporate Canada, perhaps no business opportunity to date has remained so underleveraged as achieving gender diversity. Consider these facts:

• Women are the majority of university graduates in Canada
• Women constitute almost one-half of Canada’s labour force
• Women represent more than one-third of Canada’s managers and play a growing role in the leadership of many organizations.
• Women in Canada influence more than 90 percent of day-to-day household consumer financial decisions.
• Research shows that diversity of thought is associated with better problem-solving.

In fact, Catalyst’s analysis of the largest U.S. companies demonstrated that those with the greatest gender diversity in corporate officer ranks—the top executive positions in a company—financially outperformed companies with proportionally fewer women at the top. [...]