Recent data from Statistics Canada reveals that men remain at the helm of corporate leadership, occupying 77 per cent of board seats in 2023. Half of all boards had no women directors at all.
Change has been sluggish. In 2016, men held about 83 per cent of all director positions. The pattern extends to top management, where 95 per cent of all CEOs in Canada were men in 2023, barely down from nearly 97 per cent in 2017.
During this time, the pipeline of women moving toward senior roles has narrowed, according to the Prosperity Project’s 2025 Annual Report Card. Women in positions reporting directly to senior management fell from 55 per cent in 2022 to 45 per cent in 2025.
As the RBC Professor in Responsible Organizations at Concordia University, I research how merit works in practice. That research can help explain why corporate leadership is still slow to admit change and women.
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The ideal leader is still a man
Underlying leadership roles is the image of what the ideal leader looks and acts like. Leadership is associated with agency — how a person takes action and makes decisions.
Those traits are strongly coded as masculine, consistent with research from social psychology going back more than two decades that shows how people can be prejudiced in favour of men leaders and against women leaders.
Women can be perceived as lacking fit-for-leadership roles, for example. Recent research suggests that prejudice can target particular women — those who challenge the status quo and advocate for social change.
Prejudice can hold women back at different points in their career, with effects that accumulate over time to make leadership less accessible to them.
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It can emerge when women are assigned less challenging work, making them less likely to be seen as leadership material. Prejudice can also surface when women are evaluated and not given the credit they deserve, making it more difficult for them to move up the hierarchy.
In some cases, it can operate before women even apply for positions. Anticipating the likelihood of rejection, some women are reluctant to apply for positions in the first place.
The ideal caregiver is still a woman
While leadership is associated with masculinity, caregiving is still seen as a feminine activity.
Canadians expect women to take on caregiver roles, counting on them to be communal and concerned with the well-being of others. Women are expected to look after children and other family members at home.
These expectations have labour market consequences. Statistics Canada data from 2022 found that women aged 25 to 54 spend 4.3 hours per day on unpaid care work at home — 65 per cent more than the 2.6 hours per day men spend on caregiving. That difference adds up to 8.5 hours per week, or a full workday, which women do not have to engage in other meaningful practices.
Women who want to advance in their careers and rise to senior leadership may therefore have less time to invest in professional work because of how unpaid labour is distributed at home.
A double bind at work
Expectations around caregiving shape the workplace too. Women are counted on to be warm and supportive at work. They are counted on to do what sociologist Arlie Hochschild first coined emotion work, which involves managing others’ experiences as part of doing a job.
Emotion work in the workplace includes “likeability labour” — work women do to ensure others see them as likeable. Women act on a gendered expectation: men are rarely evaluated on whether they are warm enough at work.
Likeability labour is illustrated in a recent study, in which I interviewed women leaders in Canadian firms about their professional experiences. One participant described how women who aren’t seen as caring at work are punished with derogatory labels:
“Women are still perceived as the ones who should be softer, caretaking, from the heart, doting, and very nurturing. When you don’t fill that role, and people expect you to fill it, you’re seen as a tough, sorry to say it, bitch.”
Such labels train women to comply with expectations around caregiving at work. At the same time, women who are intent on moving to leadership are concerned about being seen as leaders.
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Meeting expectations around caregiving and those around leadership can put women in a double bind. On the one hand, when women act assertively and show agency to meet leadership expectations, they risk being seen as not sufficiently caregiving. But on the other hand, when women display caring behaviour in the workplace, they can be regarded as lacking leadership potential.
The stickiness of social norms
Norms around leadership and care responsibilities make it difficult for women to access leadership roles. These norms, like other social norms, change slowly. Many Canadians continue to view men as “naturally better” leaders in the political sphere, seeing women as overly emotional.
Closer to the realm of the workplace, 90 per cent of young Canadians see a man when they envision a CEO. And 45 per cent of Canadians see women as “naturally better” at caring for children than men.
Additionally, young Canadians are split on how they view gender inequalities — and the split is most pronounced in two areas. First, 68 per cent of women under the age of 35 agree that women will not be equal to men unless there are more women leaders in business and government, compared to 37 per cent of young men.
Second, 54 per cent of young men agree that women’s rights have been promoted so much that men are discriminated against, which 27 per cent of young women concur with.
These two areas of difference suggest that young women and men have distinct views on how women and men are treated and what their roles should be. Moreover, they evoke little exchange and discussion between young women and men that could foster more empathy and better understanding of where the other person stands.
Altogether, these differences paint the picture of a challenging road ahead for altering norms around leadership and caregiving.
