Canada stands on the brink of economic upheaval, buffeted by soaring tariffs and mounting global instability. To those who think that further investment in childcare is a luxury we cannot afford in these times, they would be wrong. A robust care economy will be Canada’s best defence, building resilience, boosting productivity, and ensuring our nation’s inclusive future. Most importantly, it enables women—who still shoulder a disproportionate share of caregiving—to fully participate in the labour market, closing long-standing gender gaps in income, leadership, and opportunity.

Across the world, LGBTQ+ communities are confronting a growing tsunami of hostility – laws targeting their identities, escalating social ostracism, and rhetoric that feels ripped straight from darker chapters of history. But there’s another battlefront, quieter yet no less fierce: the sleek, hushed boardrooms of corporate power. In Canada, as in much of the world, the lavender ceiling remains stubbornly intact, nearly invisible yet profoundly unyielding.Take this sobering statistic: among the more than 9,300 directors who graced Toronto Stock Exchange-listed companies from 2015 to 2022, just 0.15 per cent were openly LGBTQ+.

LGBTQ+ people are underrepresented on corporate boards of directors and throughout most organizations in Canada. This report summarizes findings from an analysis of representation on Toronto Stock Exchange-listed companies from 2015-2022 along with a review of the existing research on LGBTQ+ representation on boards and within organizations.

There are many open questions about whether corporate purpose should have instrumental or moral foundations, how to put boundaries around who counts as a stakeholder and how engagement can lead to the fair distribution of value. We are in the midst of a great burgeoning of experimentation in both research and practice to continue to answer these questions. The agenda is ambitious — and necessarily so. Purpose-driven leadership is not just for CEOs. It is going to take each and every one of us — in our roles as practitioners, stakeholders and academics — to transform our own practices and seek the radical transformations that have the potential to save our society and our planet. Make no mistake: Progress depends upon it.

Comply-or-explain disclosure requirements for gender diversity on corporate boards have existed in Canada since 2014. We discuss the initial findings from our on-going project to analyze the effects of Canada’s regulation. Our qualitative content analysis of the texts of Canadian corporate disclosures involves a four-year period and entails over 3,000 firm-year observations. With a focus on firms’ explanations for non-compliance, our results suggest that firms avoid the costliest actions, that they rely on obfuscation and other approaches to make it difficult for evaluators to interpret the disclosures, and that they offer thin, weak, or otherwise suboptimal explanations for failure to make progress that draw on tired tropes about meritocracy and pipeline limitations.

Yet the challenge is not primarily about the pipeline. There are many board-qualified LGBTQ+ people who are not being given opportunities to serve as a corporate director today. Canadian boards are often seen as “boys’ clubs” that have excluded not only women (who are only 27 per cent of board directors today) but also other people from under-represented groups (racialized people, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people to name a few). By blaming the pipeline, they are giving themselves an excuse for not trying harder to build a more diverse, and therefore more effective, board.

Since 2000, women's representation in health professions has increased steadily across the globe. In 2019, nearly half of all doctors in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development were women. And labour force survey data from 57 countries indicate that the majority of health-care workers in higher wage occupations under the age of 40 years are women. Although progress in women's representation is worth celebrating, numerical parity belies the challenges women continue to confront in medicine.

Analyzing the dynamics of remote work with an intersectional lens—one that pays attention to the compounding impacts of gender, race, Indigeneity, immigration status, disability and other factors—allows us to understand how different groups may be experiencing this transformation in work culture. While remote and hybrid work models have improved many workers’ lives, they are also associated with career penalties, work-family conflict, higher stress levels, and other mental health challenges—particularly for those who were already experiencing inequity. Many of these disadvantages come about not because of anything inherent about remote work but because of the biases, stereotypes and social norms surrounding paid and unpaid work. Organizations therefore need to take measures to ensure well-being and fairness for all employees who are now working from home.

While the social, moral, human rights and economic arguments for eliminating Gender-Based Violence are unequivocally clear, actions to repair the tears in the societal fabric that enable GBV have been fraught with inadequate and piecemeal investments. This has resulted in uncoordinated and sub-optimal approaches to preventing and addressing the scourge of gendered violence. Yet, with the right support, survivors can experience improved health and well-being, improved self-confidence, reduced psychological distress, increased social connectedness, increased motivation to help others facing violence, and be empowered to regain control and autonomy in their lives. So, how should these barriers be addressed?

Gender-based violence (GBV) remains a global pandemic with destructive effects on the well- being of women and girls. Defined as any act of violence that results in physical, sexual, or emotional harm and suffering, GBV takes many forms, encompassing intimate partner violence (IPV), non-partner violence, and other harmful acts directed at people based on their gender expression, gender identity, or perceived gender. It can include physical abuse, criminal harassment, emotional and psychological abuse, and coercive control. For all those experiencing GBV—but especially for racialized women—leaving abusive relationships can entail significant challenges, among them surmounting barriers that prevent GBV survivors from accessing formal care and support. This report synthesizes research on barriers to accessing support services for racialized women who experience gender-based violence and the outcomes associated with access to support services that reflect the lived experiences of racialized GBV survivors.

AI has immense potential. It can improve our productivity and also our predictions and decisions, which in turn can help reduce disparities. We all have unconscious biases that influence our choices and actions. It can be hard to understand how we’ve arrived at them and whether biases have played a role. Because AI is programmed and can be audited and changed, it can theoretically help us be more accurate and fairer.  But AI is built with data that has been generated from databases of existing information, such as images, texts, and historical data, so our biases become built-in. Its effects on marginalized groups are often unrecognized even as they are perpetuated, because the technology appears to be objective and neutral. Our report on AI research outlines what scholars have found about how AI can contribute to inequity and what can be done to mitigate it. 

It's tempting to think that an inclusive approach to analytics is just an add-on to a day-to-day job, or worse, isn't profitable. But those are all just myths, say GATE's Sarah Kaplan and Lechin Lu. Gender Analytics is a process to embed insights about gender and its intersections with race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, Indigeneity and other factors to create inclusive product, service and policy design. Despite having a potentially significant impact on society, the idea of inclusive analytics is often misunderstood, though it’s recently risen to prominence as companies prioritize equity and diversity not just in their talent management but also in how they go to market. And there’s a significant upside to the shift: Applying a gender and inclusion lens to product and service development could result in new opportunities for businesses.