Three very successful women leaders will be at the Empire Club this week to talk about what it’s like to be a female corporate executive in Canada in 2015. Nestle Canada’s President and CEO Shelley Martin, the Mars Discovery District’s CEO Ilse Treurnicht, and eBay Canada’s Managing Director Andrea Stairs will give a snapshot in time of what issues female leaders face today, and how they see the challenges for women in the workforce. They will be interviewed by prominent business journalist Amber Kanwar from the BNN Television Network. While there is still a long road ahead for women to be equally represented and compensated in the corner offices of the nation, there has been tremendous progress since some of Canada’s pioneering female executives addressed the Club in the past. Take the case of Ellen L. Fairclough, for example, Canada’s first woman cabinet minister who gave a rather remarkable speech on December 12th, 1957 which she entitled “Canadian Women as Citizens”. Before entering politics as a City Councillor in Hamilton, she had dared to open her own Public Accounting Practice in 1935 with the sign “E.L. Fairclough, Certified Public Accountant” hung above the door so that people would walk into her offices expecting-of course-to find a man, and she delighted in seeing the expressions on certain faces when they realized that she was not the secretary but the owner of the establishment! Here is a part of her vision on women business leaders from that Empire Club speech from almost half a century ago:
“The same situation occurs in business and finance, where despite the large numbers of women shareholders, the names of relatively few women appear in the lists of directors of Canadian companies. It is my conviction that this situation will change in the next ten years, but I think that I would be dodging facts, if I did not admit that, although legislation has been adopted in most of Canada today which gives equal pay for equal work to men and women, there has as yet not been general acceptance of the principle of equal opportunity. It is my opinion that women themselves must show their willingness to accept responsibility to a greater degree than they have done heretofore.”
While Canada’s first female Cabinet Minister may have been hopeful, she no doubts would have realized the long road ahead when being introduced as the first “Ladies Day” guest of that season…we were, after all, still more than a decade away from Gloria Steinham and the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Even in today’s world, she would no doubt recognize that women still face daunting challenges when dealing with certain male colleagues. Present-day federal minister Rona Ambrose told the story not too long ago of her first cabinet meeting where she arrived in the room and was almost immediately asked by a male colleague to go and get him a coffee before the meeting began. She complied, by the way, just to see the look on his face after the meeting started and she was addressed by everyone in the room as “Minister”.
The corporate leaders who address the Club this week will have their own stories to tell, and everyone in the room will be listening intently to better understand if we have really made significant progress in treating women in the workplace as true equals, or if-like the civil rights movement in the United States- the path to true equality is never easy and occasionally suffers serious setbacks that today’s female corporate leaders must constantly battle against to ensure that the trend is always going in the right direction.
