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.

Read more: Why being called ‘detail-oriented’ can stall a woman’s career

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........

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