Federal Minister of Small Business Mary Ng has told Canadian business executives that more diversity at the top is key to Canada's economic success. 

"Building a more inclusive economy is not only the right thing to do -- it's what's best for our economy. The evidence is clear: companies that are diverse at the board and executive level outperform their peers," said Ng. 

Ng delivered the keynote address at an event co-hosted by Diversio, an AI-powered platform helping to uncover diversity gaps and systemic biases in the workplace. 

Canada should take concrete steps to fix issues 

After Ng’s comments, international business executives highlighted the systemic challenges facing women and racialized individuals at the corporate level and called on the Canadian private and public sectors to take concrete, metrics-based action to rectify these issues. 

"We see women time and again outperforming in executive operating roles,” said Laura McGee, CEO and co-founder of Diversio. “We need to identify what is holding back women and people of colour and treat this issue as a systemic one, like you would with any other business issue. Metrics can and should be tracked to help rectify inequalities.” 

Diversio has a database that tracks diversity and inclusion across the S&P, FTSE and TSX. This tool has shown that there is under-representation of roughly the same magnitude, across all three regions. For example, in the U.S. only 23 per cent of executive positions are held by women and only 13 per cent are held by people of colour.