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.

Our ongoing obsession with the myth of meritocracy is now spreading to education systems in developing economies with pernicious effects.

Female-led startups find it harder to obtain funding than those led by men; women are often not hired or promoted at the rate of men; and even in the 21st century, women are not paid equally for the same work. The bottom line: the belief that we operate in a meritocracy takes us off the hook from examining the potential for bias in our evaluations of women-led businesses and women leaders.