This article is the first in a two-part series on the evolution of Hydro Québec’s senior management, based on its organization charts since 2005.
The first article is about diversity in senior management: the presence of women, but also some indicators of broader diversification.
The second will focus on the growth of the senior management structure and on organizational logic.
All these dimensions are connected. When the number of visible leaders increases, it is not only a question of size or titles. It also says something about how Hydro-Québec coordinates, segments, regroups and tries to hold together its major industrial functions under the logic of “One Hydro.”
Senior management organization charts do not say everything. But they do say something. They show what the organization chooses to make visible: its hierarchical levels, functions, priorities, silos, groupings and, sometimes, blind spots.
A simple question, a more complicated answer
My starting question was simple: has Hydro-Québec’s senior management become more female over the past twenty years?
The short answer is yes.
But the fuller answer is more interesting. Senior management has clearly become more female. The total workforce, not really. That contrast is worth examining.
How I counted
I reviewed 27 Hydro-Québec senior management organization charts from 2005, at the start of Thierry Vandal’s presidency, through 2026.
Senior management organization charts for 2005 and 2026.
In practice, these organization charts correspond to Hydro-Québec’s management level 3 and above: directors, senior directors, vice-presidents, and the other positions visible in the charts.
This choice has an important limitation: it does not capture Hydro-Québec’s entire management structure. Below these levels, there are also level 4 and 5 managers and, in some cases, team leaders, coordinators and other supervisory roles. The analysis therefore does not cover all managers in the company.
It remains relevant, however, because at Hydro-Québec, major decisions are generally made at director level and above. That is where the major trade-offs, organizational priorities and the most visible positions in the power structure sit.
I excluded vacant positions. People who appeared more than once were counted only once. For interim positions, I kept the persons, but assigned them to the highest level at which they appeared. To compare with the total workforce, I used Hydro-Québec’s annual reports.
For gender, I first relied on the French titles used in the organization charts – “directeur” vs. “directrice”, “vice-président” vs. “vice-présidente”, etc. When the title did not make it clear, the first name served as an additional indicator. This is not an HR register. But because the organization charts are in French, the titles provide a fairly solid basis for tracking the trend.
A senior management group that is clearly more female
In 2005, women represented about 14% of the people visible at director level and above.
By 2015, the figure was around 25%.
In recent organization charts, women account for almost 40% of the people in senior management.
That is a significant increase.
It also deserves to be put into perspective. Hydro-Québec is an electricity, engineering, grid operations, maintenance and major construction organization. These are not exactly sectors that have historically been highly feminized.
With an expanded senior management group that has been roughly 35% to 40% female in recent years, Hydro-Québec appears to perform better than several Canadian benchmarks in the presence of women in senior management.
The comparison must remain cautious. The organization charts studied here measure expanded senior management, meaning director level and above. Available Canadian statistics do not always measure exactly the same thing. But the order of magnitude is telling: Hydro-Québec is not lagging in the feminization of its visible senior management. Quite the opposite.
The most interesting point, however, is that this progress does not simply reflect the evolution of the overall workforce.
Evolution of four diversity indicators at Hydro-Québec: the proportion of women in expanded senior management (blue), the proportion of women in the total workforce (beige), an index of “other” family names in the senior management organization charts (purple), and the official proportion of other underrepresented groups in the total workforce (green). Senior management data come from the organization charts; total workforce data come from the annual reports.
The chart captures the contrast well.
The blue line shows the increase in the proportion of women in expanded senior management. It starts from a very low level in 2005, rises gradually, then accelerates, especially after the late 2010s.
The beige line shows the proportion of women in the total workforce. It is much more stable and slightly down over the period as a whole.
The green line shows the official data on other underrepresented groups in the total workforce. It rises clearly from the beginning of the available series.
The purple line, finally, gives an imperfect but useful indicator of the apparent diversification of family names in the senior management organization charts, with the percentage of names other than traditional French-Canadian names, for example Nguyen rather than Tremblay. It also rises, but more gradually.
The chart’s main message is clear: the transformation is real, but it does not have the same shape or the same pace, depending on whether we look at senior management, the total workforce, self-reported data or the more fragile index based on names visible in the organization charts.
A total workforce that has not become more female
According to Hydro-Québec’s annual reports, women represented 29.8% of the total workforce in 2005.
The figure reached 31.3% in 2007.
In 2025, it was 27.7%.
In other words, Hydro-Québec’s total workforce is slightly less female than it was twenty years ago.
Senior management, by contrast, has become more female.
That gap matters. It suggests that representation efforts at senior management levels have had a real effect, even though the company’s core occupations remain strongly male. The evolution of leadership therefore does not mechanically follow the overall employee pool.
It is both a positive signal and a limit.
A positive signal, because the progress at the top is real.
A limit, because a company does not transform only through its senior management organization chart. It also transforms through its occupations, internal career paths, promotions, technical positions, work sites, control centres, maintenance teams and engineering functions.
Uneven feminization across functions
It is also necessary to look at where women are located in the organization.
Feminization appears stronger in certain functions: finance, governance, corporate affairs, communications, sustainable development, customer experience, community relations and some planning or development functions.
It is less visible in the functions that carry much of the industrial execution: operations, maintenance, construction, engineering, transmission, generation and heavy asset management.
But shortcuts should be avoided. One might instinctively associate HR and organizational development with a stronger female presence. Yet in the 2026 organization chart, only one of the eight leaders in that function is a woman. That is counterintuitive, but important: the label attached to a function is not enough to predict its composition.
There are, of course, women in technical and operational functions. There are more than before, and that is, in fact, what sparked my curiosity and led to these articles. Some now hold important positions in these areas.
But the major industrial blocks remain more male.
That is probably where the real issue lies.
Another form of diversification
It is also important to distinguish gender diversity from ethnocultural and social diversity.
Hydro-Québec’s official data show significant progress for other underrepresented groups in the total workforce: Indigenous people, visible minorities, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
According to the annual reports, this proportion rose from 6.6% in 2013, the first year available in public reports, to 14.2% in 2025. It has, therefore, more than doubled in twelve years. This increase is clearly visible in the green line of the chart: it is steady and robust.
Family names in the senior management organization charts also provide a signal, though of a different kind. By “other names”, I obviously do not mean that a name can identify a person’s origin, identity or belonging. That would be inaccurate and reductive. I use a narrower definition: names that do not appear to belong to the traditionally dominant French-Québec or francophone European pool in large Québec organizations. In other words, names that stand apart from the very common set of names such as Tremblay, Gagnon, Roy, Côté and so on. Conversely, names such as Nguyen, Singh, Chen, Ahmed, Patel, Kowalski or Hernandez are classified in the “other names” category used here. These are only illustrative examples used to build a descriptive index, not an attempt to identify the actual origin of individuals. The index only serves to capture, imperfectly, whether the senior management organization chart is diversifying over time.
According to this index, the proportion of “other names” in the organization charts has risen from about 4% to 5% in the late 2000s and mid-2010s to about 9% to 10% in recent versions.
The trend is therefore visible, but it must be read cautiously: the senior management organization chart appears less homogeneous than it was fifteen or twenty years ago, without allowing us to treat it as a precise measure of ethnocultural diversity.
Hydro-Québec as a pool of leaders for Québec
There is also a broader effect to consider.
Hydro-Québec is not only a large company. It is also a school of industrial, technical and institutional management.
People who hold senior management positions there do not all remain at Hydro-Québec until retirement. Some leave to lead other organizations, private companies, Crown corporations, professional services firms, technology companies or industrial projects.
If Hydro-Québec diversifies its senior management, it can therefore indirectly contribute to diversifying Québec’s pool of leaders.
That is an important point.
A large public organization does not only transform its own internal culture. It also trains managers, executives, experts and women leaders who later circulate through the economy.
Hydro-Québec already played this role in the 1960s and 1970s. It did not only build dams and transmission lines. It also helped train a generation of engineers, managers, financiers and professionals who later left a significant mark on Québec’s economy.
In that sense, the feminization and diversification of Hydro-Québec’s senior management can also have an effect that goes beyond Hydro-Québec itself. Gradually, they can help change the profile of leadership across Québec’s energy, industrial and institutional ecosystem.
What this really says
The conclusion is fairly clear.
Hydro-Québec’s senior management has become more female, but its overall workforce has not.
It also appears to compare relatively well with several Canadian benchmarks on the presence of women in senior management, especially considering that it operates in the electric infrastructure sector.
But this feminization remains uneven. It appears stronger in some functions and less present in several technical and operational decision centres.
The organization also appears to have diversified in other ways. Official data shows a marked increase in underrepresented groups in the total workforce. The organization charts, for their part, suggest that senior management names are less homogeneous than at the beginning of the period studied.
The next test will, therefore, not be only to reach a better overall percentage of women in senior management.
It will be to see whether this diversity, in gender as well as apparent origin, is also present in the decision centres that will actually drive the energy transition: grid, operations, construction, planning, projects, maintenance and asset management.
That is where a large part of Hydro-Québec’s future will be decided.
And perhaps also part of the future diversification of Québec’s economic leadership.
In the next article, I will look at the other major transformation visible in the organization charts: the increase in the number of leaders and the way it accompanies the new organizational logic. In other words, how Hydro-Québec moved from a more legible structure built around its major industrial functions to a denser, more transversal organization, structured more around the logic of “One Hydro.”
