Rania llewellyn, CEO for Laurentian Bank, stands for a portrait outside one of their branches in downtown Toronto on October 20, 2020.Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s biggest banks are lagging smaller financial institutions in promoting women to their top ranks.
Only 18 per cent of chief executives at the country’s largest lenders are women – just two out of 11. By way of comparison, 38 per cent of credit unions have female chief executives, according to a report by DBRS Morningstar released Wednesday.
While women make up 45 per cent of bank boards – which are responsible for recruiting and hiring chief executives – the industry has largely failed to move female employees into its highest ranks.
The Big Six banks – Royal Bank of Canada RY-T, Toronto-Dominion Bank TD-T, Bank of Nova Scotia BNS-T, Bank of Montreal BMO-T, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CM-T, and National Bank of Canada NA-T – are all led by men. Rania Llewellyn of Laurentian Bank of Canada and Linda Seymour of HSBC Bank Canada, which is in the process of being acquired by Royal Bank, are the only women leading large lenders in the country.
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The industry has undergone years of turnover among women in senior ranks who were considered chief executive candidates. In January, CIBC’s head of personal and business banking, Laura Dottori-Attanasio, left to take the top job at another company. Last year, Teri Currie left her job leading Canadian retail banking at TD. In 2021, Joanna Rotenberg quit as Bank of Montreal’s head of wealth management to join Fidelity Investments. And senior executives such as TD’s Colleen Johnston and Royal Bank’s Janice Fukakusa also left their positions in recent years.
More than half of bank employees are female, but women make up just 33 per cent of senior executive teams, compared with 44 per cent at the eight credit unions included in the report. These are the key positions that boards typically look at when developing and recruiting chief executive candidates.
Women are far less likely to lead financial or revenue-generating business segments that offer opportunities to develop the skills and experience often required to run a bank. Women account for 82 per cent of chief human resources officers and 55 per cent of chief legal officers at banks. Meanwhile, they make up only 18 per cent of chief financial officers and chief risk officers.
“Few banks have placed a concerted effort into ensuring there is a large enough pool of female talent with varied experience and stints in running different businesses, specifically in roles with profit-and-loss responsibilities, which would make them ideal candidates for the CEO position,” DBRS said in the report.
Even among financial advisers, only 15 per cent are female, while assets controlled by women are expected to almost double by 2028, according to a report released Wednesday by Sun Life Global Investments.
While gender parity remains elusive at Canada’s banks, it is worse still at U.S. banks, which have only one female chief executive, and European lenders, with four female chief executives comprising just 9 per cent of the top jobs, according to the DBRS report.
According to Bloomberg’s Gender-Equality Index, which was cited in the report, the eight participating Canadian banks rank among the top financial institutions globally when it comes to attracting, retaining and developing women for senior leadership positions.
“So, the question remains: if over half of the sampled Canadian banks’ workforce is female, and the talent and leadership pipeline is ahead of most other U.S. and European peers, why does the proportion of women still decrease markedly at executive levels?” DBRS asked in the report.
“Financial institutions will have to go beyond disclosures on gender parity at a workforce level and start promoting women to higher executive positions, including CEO.”