Despite recent progress, Canada’s venture capital sector still lacks diversity among its executive and management personnel, according to the second edition of an annual survey conducted by the Business Development Bank of Canada.
Headed from Montreal, the BDC is the main federal Crown corporation for investment and financing of SMEs in Canada.
This second annual survey on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI in analyst vocabulary, covers 72 venture capital managers and 1,192 invested companies. According to the BDC, this contingent of participants corresponds to nearly two-thirds (63%) of all active venture capital funds in Canada.
Among the BDC’s main findings, gender diversity “remains insufficient at the senior levels of the private equity sector” in venture capital.
“Diversity on the boards and management of [private equity venture capital] portfolio companies continues to be an issue,” note the authors of the BDC statement.
Furthermore, among the so-called “sponsored” companies which manage funds from institutional investors for the purposes of business venture capital investments, the authors of the BDC report note that “nearly half (48%) of these limited partnerships are 100% male-owned, while 8% are 100% visible minority-owned and 2% are 100% female or Indigenous-owned.”
In an encouraging twist, the authors of the BDC statement note that “sponsored companies continue to take steps to improve diversity within their teams.”
Thus, in almost two thirds (63%) of the sponsored companies that participated in the survey, “at least half of the people hired [in the past year] were women”.
And in just over half (56%) of these corporate sponsors, “at least half of the people hired were members of visible minorities.”
“The proportion of limited companies in which women and members of visible minorities make up at least half of the staff has increased over 12 months. We see this growth as a positive step for the sector,” says Alison Nankivell, senior vice-president of investments and growth funds at BDC Capital.
Finally, the authors of this second BDC survey note that, even if a quarter (27%) of investment committees of venture capital companies are still composed entirely of men, “a little more than two thirds (68 %) of these investment committees include at least one woman and 11%, at least one indigenous person.
