How Many LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors Does Canada Have? We Investigated
By Jane Griffith and Sarah Kaplan
Pride Month is a time to celebrate the many steps taken toward achieving LGBTQ+ inclusion, while at the same time considering the numerous barriers to economic, health and social well-being that the community still faces.
Among those barriers is the “lavender ceiling” blocking LGBTQ+ people’s path toward corporate leadership and board directorships, positions that hold the reins of power in the Canadian economy. As the Ontario Securities Commission and other securities regulators contemplate expanding diversity disclosure regulations from just looking at women to include other dimensions of diversity such as LGBTQ+ representation, it is worth taking stock of how many members of the community are represented on corporate boards.
Because no comprehensive data exist on the demographics of Canadian corporate board members, the Institute for Gender and the Economy in partnership with LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors Canada undertook a study to identify all of the 9,396 corporate directors of 1,110 companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange (those subject to diversity disclosure regulations for women on boards) from 2015-2022. We then painstakingly searched newspapers, biographies, the internet and other public sources for any mention of each director’s affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community.
The depressing – but perhaps not surprising – result: we only could identify nine total board members across all years (and seven in 2022) who publicly identified as being part of the community. That’s just 0.15 per cent of total board members. Given that between 4.4 per cent and 9 per cent of the Canadian population are LGBTQ+, this number is shockingly low.