Excerpt
In recent years, American businesses have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and there are signs the trend has crossed the border into Canada.
One global study that tracks just gender equity across 19 dimensions – such as parental leave, gender pay gap and workforce representation – found that Canada, like the United States, is lagging global peers.
The Gender Equality Report and Ranking, conducted by gender data and insights provider Equileap, tracks those metrics at about 3,400 public companies with market capitalizations of more than US$2-billion in 24 developed countries.
In its 2026 edition, the National Bank of Canada took the top spot, achieving a gender equality score of 86 per cent; three points higher than the second-place finisher and the highest score ever achieved in the annual report. Canada, however, only had one other top 100 finisher, CIBC, which scored 74 per cent, placing it 48th overall.
The combined score of public Canadian enterprises, meanwhile, slipped to 45 per cent in 2026 from 46 per cent in 2025, making the country one of three where gender equity declined, along with the U.S. and New Zealand. In fact, Canada finished third from last in the annual global ranking of 16 advanced economies, ahead of only the U.S. and Japan.
“Canadian companies have room for improvement when it comes to their gender equality performance,” says Clara Sánchez, the report’s author and the corporate communications and insights manager for Equileap parent company Denominator. “Both the U.S. and Canada have almost the same average score and both had declines in 2026, so we can see a similar trend.”
In some metrics, such as gender representation, the U.S. fared better than Canada, with a workforce that is 32 per cent female, compared with Canada’s 30 per cent. Both countries, however, lag their global peers.
“North America – which in this case is just Canada and the U.S. – is the least transparent region in terms of the gender pay gap,” Ms. Sánchez says. “This reflects weaker regulatory pressure compared to regions like Europe and the Asia Pacific, where pay gap transparency has increased a lot, mainly driven by legislation.”
According to the study, 24 per cent of Canadian companies report gender pay data, compared with 74 per cent of those in Europe, following the European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive in 2023.
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