If you, like me, think most big Canadian companies have too few women on their boards of directors, then what should we make of the under-representation of aboriginals and other visible minorities?

The numbers for these two groups are much worse. To compare:

• Women comprise 50.4 per cent of the Canadian population, or 51 per cent in Metro Vancouver. They hold just eight per cent of the executive positions in Canada’s 500 largest companies, but their representation on boards of directors has inched up and now is 17.1 per cent.
• Aboriginals comprise 4.3 per cent of Canada’s population, although less than half that in Metro Vancouver. They hold 0.8 per cent of big companies’ board seats — a percentage that has been stalled for years.
• Other visible minorities comprise 19.1 per cent of the population, but the number is much higher and growing briskly in Metro Vancouver. It had reached 45.2 per cent, mostly people of Asian extraction, by 2011. In 2010, members of this group held 5.3 per cent of big companies’ board appointments, but by 2014 this number had slipped to two per cent.

Pamela Jeffery, the founder of both the Toronto-based Women’s Executive Network and the Canadian Board Diversity Council, is pleased to see at least women making progress — although not enough, in her view, and not at a fast enough rate.

But she has a sinking feeling that women’s successes in getting seats at the boardroom table may come at the expense of aboriginals and other visible minorities. When boards decide to recruit beyond their usual source of new directors — that is, their old boys’ network — the easy way is to find a well-qualified woman and then look no further.

So, to tackle the worst problem first, Jeffery is working with the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business to beat the drum for more aboriginal representation on boards that oversee Canada’s biggest companies. The council has held back-to-back summits, one in Vancouver and one in Calgary, to engage business leaders on the issue.

Jeffrey doesn’t advocate quotas, and neither do I. The problem is that quota-driven recruitment can lead to candidates being selected solely on the basis of their ethnicity, not what they can bring to the table.

But boards undermine their own potential effectiveness when all their members are near clones of each other, with similar backgrounds, experience and attitudes.

Diversity can bring new insights to the table — new ways of looking at under-served markets, whether geographically or demographically distinct from the tried-and-true, as well as ties to new talent pools that a company could tap.

Women have climbed slowly but steadily in recent years from 10.9 per cent of directors in 2001 to 13.7 per cent by 2009 and 15.6 per cent in 2013, the study shows.

However, visible minorities hold just 2 per cent of board seats, a decline from 5.3 per cent in 2010, and people who report having disabilities fill just 1.4 per cent of board seats, down from 2.9 per cent in 2010. Aboriginal directors hold 0.8 per cent of board seats, a number unchanged from 2010.

Diversity council founder Pamela Jeffery said it is disappointing to see a decline in visible minority directors while Canada’s population – especially in major cities where head offices are located – becomes steadily more diverse.

“I think it underscores what we know, which is that most board seats are filled in a less-than-desirable way, with board members sitting at the table asking each other who they know,” she said. “Sadly, aboriginal people or people with disabilities are not in their networks.”

Ms. Jeffery said she is encouraged, however, that the rate of increase for women on boards has accelerated, growing by 1.5 percentage points between 2013 and 2014 after increasing by just 0.32 percentage points in each year on average between 2001 and 2012.

However, Ms. Jeffery said the level of gender diversity remains low compared to many other major countries. Britain, for example, will have 25 per cent women on boards of its top 100 companies by next year, she said.