Welcome to the seventh annual edition of our Women Lead Here benchmark, an assessment of female executives at Canada’s largest publicly traded companies.
In the spirit of “If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it,” the team at Report on Business magazine assessed approximately 500 publicly traded companies in Canada with annual revenue greater than $50 million for the percentage of women in executive leadership positions. The 85 companies that earned a spot on this year’s benchmark are clearly outperforming the field on executive gender equity. For the first time in ranking history, more than half of winning firms have reached or surpassed gender parity in their boardrooms. On average, 48% of the people in their executive ranks are women, including a (relatively) respectable 21% of their CEOs.
OUR METHODOLOGY
To create the 2026 Women Lead Here list, Report on Business magazine assessed approximately 500 publicly traded companies in Canada with annual revenues greater than $50 million. Companies were evaluated from October to early December 2025 on their executive teams. Our researchers evaluated each company’s top three tiers of executive leadership while measuring the ratio of female-identifying to male-identifying individuals at each tier. Tier 1 is CEO or equivalent, Tier 2 is C-suite, president or equivalent, and Tier 3 is generally EVP, SVP or equivalent. In the assessment process, we contacted each evaluated company by email to confirm the accuracy of data. We then applied a weighted methodology. We considered the company’s profitability, revenue growth and three-year return. The diversity of an executive team was also considered, as was the year-over-year comparison of female representation in the company’s executive ranks. We then assigned each company a score and applied a final screen to the top quintile: Companies with fewer than 30% of overall executive roles held by women were excluded, as were companies with only one woman-identifying executive. Research by Fiona Collie, Liza Agrba, Claire Robbins and Sharon Joseph.
