There's been a lot of talk over the past decade or so about women breaking through the glass ceiling, but the latest numbers from executive search firm Rosenzweig & Company show that fewer than five percent of the top-paid executive officers in Canada's largest publicly traded companies are women.

Some countries are already taking action to correct the corporate gendered imbalance. On Jan 1, a law came into effect in Norway requiring it's publicly traded companies to increase the number of women on their boards of directors within two years to at least 40 percent (in Canada, only 9 percent of board seats are occupied by women). Penalty for noncompliance? Disbandment of the offending corporation.