A recent study of 600 Canadian firms with 50 or more employees found that companies whose senior ranks are mostly women report a higher return on investment than those whose top tier is less than 40% female. Even so, women still fill only about a quarter of these upper echelons. The study, says its author Renata Voss, raises the question of why such an imbalance persists and how it is best addressed. "It matters," Voss says, "because in twenty-first-century Canada people like to believe, rightly or wrongly, that advancement rests on achievement, not on gender."

Dominic Hale, who teaches organizational behaviour at the University of Calgary, argues that the imbalance is mainly for women themselves to remedy, since it stems from the tentative way they approach promotion. Whereas many men will eagerly seize the chance to advance, he maintains, women tend to hold themselves back until they are convinced they are ready. "A lot of women regard self-promotion as somehow unseemly," Hale observes, "and that caution restrains them, which is ironic, since the steadiness it reflects is exactly what senior roles require. The remedy, in the end, rests with women, who simply need to put their hands up."