Meet Canada’s Best Employers For Diversity 2024

“Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination,” sang fictional chocolatier Willy Wonka, ushering a group of kids and their parents into his chocolate factory. “Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.”

But it was real-life confectioner Milton Hershey who actually changed the world when he founded his chocolate company in Pennsylvania in 1894. With the dual purpose of making quality chocolate and improving the lives of others, Hershey created an iconic brand and became one of the most generous philanthropists of his day. In 1909, he founded a cost-free boarding school for underprivileged children, and later donated his entire fortune to it. During the Great Depression, Hershey not only built his chocolate factory, generating jobs for 600 workers, he created a model community that afforded those workers housing, public schools, parks, a bank, a theater, a sports arena, and a trolley system.

At the company’s Canadian headquarters in Ontario, his mission lives on. “I feel truly honored to keep that genuine legacy going in ways that support our people and our communities,” says Herjit Bhalla, vice president of Hershey Canada and AMEA (Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa). The company’s employees seem to agree, as their votes helped the Hershey Company rank No. 1 on Forbes list of Canada’s Best Employers For Diversity 2024.

To determine the third annual ranking, Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to survey approximately 40,000 Canadian workers at companies with at least 500 employees. (The government services sector was not included.) Participants anonymously rated their companies on diversity-related issues, including age, gender, ethnicity, disability and LGBTQ+ equality. Survey respondents were also asked to evaluate companies they knew through industry experience or through family and friends who worked there. Responses from the past three years were considered. Additionally, each company’s diversity-related best practices were researched and analyzed, and that data was combined with the survey results to produce each organization’s score. Ultimately, the 200 companies with the highest scores landed on our final list. (For more details on the methodology, see below.)

The Hershey Company, which also scored the No. 1 spot on Canada’s Best Employers this year, prides itself on having “a lively, engaging culture focused on goodness with an emphasis on our value of togetherness,” says Bhalla. But it’s more than just a vibe. In 2020, the company developed the Pathways Project, which includes a five-year plan for achieving a range of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals (known as “EDI” goals among Canadians), including increasing representation and advancement of women, people of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ individuals. By 2025, the company aims for a workforce comprised of 50% women and 30-40% people of color, and a leadership made up of 40-42% women and 15-22% people of color.

Hershey has also prioritized pay transparency (providing each salaried employee with metrics to illustrate how their base salary compares in the marketplace), employee resource groups, or ERGs (enabling employees to develop and influence company policy), a leadership accelerator program (which develops talent from within the company), and increased supplier diversity.

Such initiatives are part of a larger trend among Canadian employers, according to our analysis. Statista’s researchers found that the share of women in executive positions in Canada has increased from 35% last year to 38% this year. Notably, women occupy only 34% of executive positions in the United States. And while the share of female CEOs in Canada has remained consistent at 21% since we began producing this yearly analysis in 2022, it eclipses the share of female CEOs in the U.S., at 15.8%.

Other findings include: 10% of the Canadian companies evaluated this year had an executive dedicated to EDI issues, 42% of companies had ERGs, 30% of companies had a supplier diversity program, and 16% of companies had an official hiring initiative geared toward Indigenous people.

Ranking at No. 2 on Forbes’ list this year was Microsoft (up from No. 6 in 2023). Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer, says that the company is committed to creating “an exceptional place to work” by “not only meeting the foundational needs of our employees, but helping them to also feel valued and fulfilled at work.”

To this end, Microsoft fosters diversity and inclusion both within and outside the company through partnerships with such organizations as: Technolochicas, which exposes young Latinas and their families to opportunities and careers in technology; Girls Who Code, which aims to close the gender gap among computer scientists through coding education, internships, and clubs for girls and young women; and the National Center for Women and Information Technology’s (NCWIT) Aspirations in Computing, which works to improve diversity in the computing field by offering education, scholarships, internships and community support to girls, young women and people who are gender nonconforming. Additionally, Microsoft offers a neurodiversity hiring program, training programs for people entering the tech industry from nontraditional backgrounds with diverse experiences, and a system of accountability that includes evaluating each partner’s and executive’s progress on EDI measures.

Rounding out the top five spots on Forbes’ ranking were three other large multinational corporations: Adidas (No. 3), Google (No. 4) and Apple (No. 5). In fact, almost all of the organizations in the top 10 were global companies except for BC Hydro (No. 8) and Brock University (No. 10).

Brock—celebrating its 60th anniversary this fall—is known as much for its stunning location at the center of Canada’s Niagara Peninsula as it is “for its caring campus environment, its commitment to inclusivity, accessibility, reconciliation and decolonization, and its strong ties to the Niagara community, all of which the university’s employees take great pride in,” says Amanda Villella, acting associate vice president of people and culture.

Among the myriad EDI-focused initiatives at Brock are: recruitment processes that encourage participation from a diverse pool of job candidates; an employment equity plan focused on representational hiring and promotion; employee trainings in topics such as compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA); and numerous cultural programs, such as a recent performance of Inuit drum dancing and throat singing, a deer hide rattle-making workshop, and a sage plant medicine talk—all of which were offered last month during Indigenous Peoples Awareness Week at Brock. Brock also provides opportunities for staff to support its community, as with its Food First program, which helps students impacted by food insecurity with offerings such as grocery store gift cards and pay-what-you-can farmer’s markets.

Like many of the employers on this year’s ranking, the organizations that value EDI tend to provide employees with an abundance of purpose. As Villella says: “Working at Brock brings with it the potential to make a difference.”

For the full list of Canada’s Best Employers For Diversity 2024, click here.

Methodology

To determine Canada’s Best Employers For Diversity 2024, Forbes teamed up with market research firm Statista to survey approximately 40,000 Canadian workers at companies with at least 500 employees. (The government services sector was not included.) Participants anonymously rated their companies on diversity-related issues, including age, gender, ethnicity, disability and LGBTQ+ equality. Survey respondents were also asked to evaluate companies they knew through industry experience or through family and friends who worked there. Responses from the past three years were considered.

Additionally, each company’s diversity-related best practices were analyzed and incorporated into the rankings. These key performance indicators (KPIs) included: the presence of employee resource groups, hiring programs geared toward Indigenous people, the publication of diversity data, the creation of an accessible workplace for people with disabilities, the percentage of women in board and executive positions, and external practices such as supplier diversity. Each employer’s score was based on the organization’s KPI data and survey results. The survey responses from current employees were weighted more heavily than those from past employees and from people who knew the company second-hand. Responses from people belonging to underrepresented groups were weighted significantly higher than the responses from people outside those groups. Recent data received a heavier weight than older data. Ultimately, the 200 companies with the highest scores landed on our list.

As with all Forbes lists, companies pay no fee to participate or be selected. To read more about how we make these lists, click here. For questions about this list, please email listdesk [at] forbes.com.