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Breaking through, building forward: women reshaping Canadian mortgage finance
Leaders from Haventree Bank, MCAN Home Mortgage, First National, Sherwood Mortgage Group, and EQ Bank discuss why advancing women in mortgage finance requires more than opportunity. It demands cultures that retain, mentor, and elevate leadership authentically
Line Allaire
Haventree Bank
Industry experts
Leanne Conroy
MCAN Home Mortgage
Elena Robinson
First National
Line Allaire, CPA, CA is vice president of operations and client experience. She oversees mortgage and deposit operations, with a career spanning financial services and telecommunications. Allaire has held senior leadership roles at Laurentian Bank and Bell Canada, where she led client-centric transformation, cloud-enabled operations, and large-scale regulatory initiatives. Throughout her career, she has delivered meaningful business results through data-driven decision-making and inclusive leadership. Passionate about developing talent and advancing women in finance, Allaire brings a practical, outcomes-focused perspective to leadership and transformation discussions. She is fluently bilingual in English and French.
Haventree Bank
Line Allaire
Leanne Conroy is an award-winning mortgage brokering industry leader and recognized expert in alternative lending. With 20+ years in financial services – and over a decade dedicated to alternative lending – she’s a trusted voice for market trends, broker education, and strategic growth. A three-time Woman of Influence and a member of the Global Top 100 Mortgage Professionals list, Conroy is known for driving results through collaboration, leadership, and relationship-building. As regional director of sales at MCAN Home, she’s also a passionate advocate for women in mortgage finance, championing diversity, inclusion, and a balanced approach to success.
MCAN Home Mortgage
Leanne Conroy
Elena Robinson was part of the First National team as its first business development manager during its early years. She rejoined in 2018 to help launch Excalibur, First National’s alternative lending division, and transitioned to her current role in 2020. As vice president, residential sales national, Robinson brings extensive industry expertise. Throughout her three-decade career, she has developed strong skills in sales, business development, management, and training. Robinson was recognized as a CMP Woman of Influence from 2021 to 2025 and was named among the Global Best in Mortgage Elite Women in 2022 and Mortgage Global 100 in 2025.
First National
Elena Robinson
Michele Steko brings a wealth of knowledge with over 20 years of financial industry experience. Passionately driven, she has built her career starting as a mortgage broker in 2004, and has since transitioned into several roles, including business development with various lending institutions, and to VP of sales for mortgage architects. In 2021, Steko founded RISE Consulting & Communications, where she continued to offer support to brokers individually. As Sherwood’s current VP of national broker relations, she continues to support the company’s growth through ongoing coaching, masterminds, business planning, strategizing, and mentorship, making her an integral part of the Sherwood family.
Sherwood Mortgage Group
Michele Steko
“Having women in leadership is good for business. The more diversity you have, the better organizations perform. We can do the job. We just need the opportunities to get there”
Line Allaire,
Haventree Bank
Forty-five percent of the candidates in line for senior and middle management roles in the mortgage industry are women. That number sounds like progress until you follow it upward. At the C-suite, it drops to roughly 25 percent. At the CEO level, 4 percent. In the boardroom, full gender parity is not projected to arrive until 2129. Not a typo or a rounding error. A hundred and three years from now.
These are the kinds of numbers the industry loves to talk about at panels but has been slower to change. But when Line Allaire of Haventree Bank, Leanne Conroy of MCAN Home Mortgage, Elena Robinson of First National, Michele Steko of Sherwood Mortgage Group, and Zamina Walji of EQ Bank sat down for a roundtable with Canadian Mortgage Professional magazine, they were not there to recite statistics. They came to talk about what it actually takes to build a career, hold your ground, and bring others along in an industry that has made real progress and still has a long way to go.
“We were put in a box. There was an expectation and it was safe. If we don’t enable and encourage girls at a younger age, they carry that self-doubt into their careers”
Michele Steko, Sherwood Mortgage Group
“We need mentors and champions. That’s just part of it. I don’t know why we do this to ourselves. We’re afraid to be uncomfortable”
Leanne Conroy,
MCAN Home Mortgage
“Your brand is everything. You define it and shape it, but you have to stay consistent and true to it. You never know when someone is deciding whether to give you a seat at the table based on what you’re known for”
Zamina Walji,
EQ Bank
Read on
Equitable Bank has a clear mission to drive change in Canadian banking to enrich people’s lives. As Canada’s Challenger Bank™ and seventh-largest bank by assets, it leverages technology to deliver exceptional personal and commercial banking experiences and services to more than 800,000 customers and more than six million credit union members through its businesses.
It is a wholly owned subsidiary of EQB Inc. (TSX: EQB), a leading digital financial services company with $142 billion in combined assets under management and administration (as at January 31, 2026). Through its digital EQ Bank platform (eqbank.ca), its customers have named it one of the top banks in Canada on the Forbes World’s Best Banks list since 2021.
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Published June 1, 2026
“You start this at home. You encourage them to think bigger, to see more possibilities”
Elena Robinson,
First National
Zamina Walji
EQ Bank
Michele Steko
Sherwood Mortgage Group
First National Financial LP is one of Canada’s largest non-bank mortgage lenders, specializing in residential and commercial financing. Founded in 1988 and headquartered in Toronto, the company offers a broad range of mortgage solutions supported by deep industry expertise and advanced technology. First National originates and services single-family and commercial mortgages nationwide, maintaining a strong presence across major Canadian markets. As a subsidiary of First National Financial Corporation, it is recognized for its scale, service excellence, and long-standing mortgage broker partnerships, helping Canadians achieve their real estate goals.
Haventree Bank is a federally regulated Schedule I Canadian bank dedicated to advancing financial security and upward mobility for Canadians underserved by traditional institutions. Since 1990, Haventree Bank has partnered with mortgage and deposit brokers to deliver tailored financial solutions. Learn more about Haventree Bank here: www.haventreebank.com
MCAN Mortgage Corporation, operating as MCAN Financial Group, is a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: MKP). MCAN provides shareholders with access to returns generated from investments in the Canadian real estate market. The company operates across single-family residential lending, residential and commercial construction lending, commercial lending, and strategic private investments, including mortgage funds and publicly traded real estate investment trusts. MCAN also offers CDIC-eligible term deposits as a stable source of funding. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, MCAN Home Mortgage Corporation, MCAN originates single-family residential mortgages nationwide. Structured as a flow-through Mortgage Investment Corporation, MCAN distributes taxable earnings annually and operates under federal regulatory oversight.
Who’s Sherwood Mortgage Group? Established in 2008 by ex-bankers, Sherwood is one of the first and longest-standing franchises of Mortgage Architects. Now licensed in seven provinces, its composition is an aggregate of mortgage veterans, newer agents, and a strong, supportive leadership team. Sherwood’s pride continues to be fuelled by their unique family culture they’ve built and managed to maintain over 17 years. At Sherwood, agents are armed with the tools, systems, strategies, processes, ongoing education, and infinite support, as well as a true and tried mortgage playbook in order to grow a successful mortgage business! It’s a Sherwood Thing!
Zamina Walji is an executive at Equitable Bank, where she leads the reverse mortgage and insurance lending businesses. She is focused on helping Canadians unlock the value of their assets in a tax-efficient way to support goals ranging from lifestyle enhancements to long-term wealth creation. Walji has worked extensively in high-growth, scale-up, and transformation environments, holding senior leadership roles across multiple functions with responsibility for strategy, execution, and P&L management. Outside of work, Walji enjoys staying active, travelling, and spending time with her nine-year-old daughter.
EQ Bank
Zamina Walji
The ceiling everyone can see Conroy found the 2129 projection while preparing for the roundtable. “I originally read that gender parity in the boardroom would happen by 2029,” she said. “I thought, that’s only three years away. Then I looked again. It’s unacceptable.”
The frustration is sharpened by the fact that the pipeline is full. Robinson noted that at her own company, four out of six of her senior managers are female. The leader of the residential department has 60 percent of women in senior leadership roles. “There’s been progress, absolutely. But the level that hasn’t shown representation is the C-suite.”
Leaders promoting women in mortgage
Walji and Allaire both operate in environments where the gap has been closed, at least within their organizations.
Within Personal Lending at EQ Bank, two of four executives are women. At Haventree, Allaire reports to a female CEO within an executive team that has reached parity. She points to similar conditions in a previous role at Laurentian Bank.
“Having women in leadership is good for business,” Allaire said. “The more diversity you have, the better organizations perform. We can do the job. We just need the opportunities to get there.”
Walji put it in performance terms: “There’s a genuine appreciation for how women solve problems differently, collaborate differently, and make decisions differently.”
The proof of concept exists; it just has not scaled.
Staying through the hard part If getting women into the room is step one, keeping them through the messy middle of their careers is where most organizations drop the ball. This is the stage where ambition collides with caregiving, where flexibility is promised in handbooks but not always practised, and where too many talented women drift toward the door.
Allaire is living this tension right now, caring for both her children and her aging parents. For herself, and many others in the same situation, she notes that retention has to be intentional, especially around flexibility.
“It doesn’t mean we don’t want to work hard. It just means we need room to figure out how to get the work done and still be present.”
Walji pointed out that organizations “have to get to a point of understanding individuals well enough to create an environment where performance and personal priorities can coexist.” That means understanding their motivations, priorities, and values,
and then working with them to honour those. “If pick-up and drop-off is important, create space for that,” she said. “If advancement is what drives them, create stretch assignments. You have to understand what each team member actually needs.”
Both she and Robinson stressed that retention has to be proactive, not reactive. “Once someone has decided to leave, it’s almost impossible to bring them back,” Walji said. Robinson was more blunt: “Retention is not just having someone stay but also making sure they don’t want to leave.”
Steko agreed, observing that “people join people and people leave people, not companies.” The work begins before someone officially joins. She points to the interview stage, a process that often fails women. “As the interviewee, you walk in expecting it to be one-sided, questions to be fired at you, feeling like you need to prove yourself. But it works both ways. You also need to be asking the right questions, to ensure the people and culture are going to align with what you need.”
Mentorship surfaced repeatedly as the connective tissue that holds careers together during these vulnerable years. Conroy argued for structure: “We need more intentional, thoughtful mentoring.” Robinson illustrated the power of a well-timed nudge by describing how she recognized an underwriter’s potential and encouraged her to try sales. “Sometimes you have to tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Have you considered doing this?’ And what I loved was that once she got into the role, she immediately started asking, ‘What can I do next?’” That kind of self-driven growth, she said, is exactly what you want to retain.
But Robinson’s example raises a harder question: what happens when nobody taps you? Walji offered a candid reflection from her own recent hiring experience. “When I post a role on LinkedIn, the better candidates send me a pitch. Not just an email. They’ve done research on the problems I’m facing, and they tell me why they can help. They immediately jump to the top of the process.”
“Women can sometimes not advocate for themselves as much,” Walji continued. “And when I’m looking to fill critical roles, the people who make it easy to say yes get the first look.”
Conroy connected the dots: “We need mentors and champions. That’s just part of it. I don’t know why we do this to ourselves. We’re afraid to be uncomfortable.” She argued that women have to be purposeful in their planning, and that lateral career moves should be normalized rather than seen as stalling. “Linear movements are fine. They’re all part of the plan.”
Steko’s own career move illustrates what happens when a candidate takes the advocacy piece into their own hands. At the height of the pandemic, when most of the industry was focused on holding on to what they had, she left a secure, comfortable role for a new opportunity. The move took more than professional conviction. It took what she calls “enrolling” her family in the idea, laying out the reasoning before naming the decision. “I went on for five minutes about how great it was going to be before I actually told them what it was,” she said. Her logic was simple: the risk of trying something and failing felt smaller than the risk of looking back and wondering, what if.
Authentic, direct, and tired of apologizing for it When Steko was asked whether she had felt pressure to lead differently because of expectations placed on female executives, her answer was clear. “If there was that pressure, I may have broken the mould a little, because I’ve always led with kindness and understanding.” She rejected the outdated idea that women need to be cutthroat to earn credibility, noting that it’s a people business.
“Having that open dialogue and a support system makes a difference. You can take a different approach and still be effective.”
For Steko, the shift she is seeing across the industry is encouraging. More women are leading on their own terms, not performing a version of leadership designed by someone else.
That willingness to own a decision has shaped more than just Walji’s leadership style. Early in her role, she challenged traditional approaches, opting to test and learn with more agile ways of approaching problems. One test was around marketing, and, although there was limited data to support the new direction, she built in a monitoring framework to contain the downside. Her experiment improved acquisition efficiency and unlocked customer segments the team had not previously understood. It was, by her own admission, a moment of managed conviction more than certainty.
Walji described what many women in senior roles experience: the same behaviour read two different ways depending on who delivers it. But she’s stopped adjusting for it.
“Over time I have built the confidence in leading authentically, rather than trying to lead differently. I have focused on being clear, consistent, and outcome-oriented, while ensuring people understand that strong leadership and empathy are not mutually exclusive.”
She added that toughness and warmth are not competing qualities. “I want my team to be the most fun team. We’re innovators. We do the cool stuff. But if you’re consistent and fair, people follow you. And then that label of ‘she’s too tough’ fades, and it becomes ‘she delivers.’”
Allaire echoed this experience, from being described as too aggressive in her approach to getting kudos when everything’s
done. Robinson experienced the double standard from a different angle. Male colleagues told her she needed to be tougher. She did not take the note.
“I told them, I lead differently than you. I believe in being kind and empathetic, with open communication and clear expectations. I don’t want to conform to how you think I should lead.” Steko reinforced the principle: “The only way you’re going to get the results you want is if you maintain your authenticity. You can’t try to do it someone else’s way and expect to be comfortable or effective.”
Conroy pulled the thread that sits underneath all of it. “I attribute the competitive instinct to something deep in us. In a dog-eat-dog world, we need to become allies, not enemies.” Allaire agreed: “Earlier on, there was competition. There’s only one seat, and it’s either you or me. Now I think it’s really important that we make room for each other. I’m seeing that shift, but it takes intention.”
The jungle gym, not the ladder When the conversation turned to younger women entering the industry, the panellists pushed back on the assumption that advancement means a straight line up.
Allaire borrowed Sheryl Sandberg’s metaphor: “I see career growth as a jungle gym, not a ladder. Lateral moves give you so much more growth. At the time, I didn’t always see the value. But when you get to the next level, you realize how glad you are that you took them, because now you understand all the other parts of the business.” She mentors women by asking what they genuinely love about their work – not the title, not the salary – and helping them find roles that match from a different angle. “You might move up the same ladder for 10 years and realize you would have been happier doing something else.”
Robinson’s own trajectory is a case in point. Her move into alternative lending came through one of the more disruptive turning points of her career. After a divorce from a husband she had built a business with, she walked away from that business entirely and stepped into a segment of the market that, at the time, had only two serious players. It was an unfamiliar space requiring her to learn new products, new risk frameworks, and a new client profile, all at once. Looking back, she is unequivocal about what that period taught her. Mistakes are part of the
job, and most of them are useful. The only decision she regrets is the one that was never made.
Conroy reinforced the point from a sales perspective: “Just because you’re at the top of your numbers doesn’t mean you automatically get handed the next role.” She referenced Oprah’s well-known observation about not finding her niche until 40 and urged younger professionals not to rush. “You don’t have to find it now. You just have to be dedicated and do things well.”
Steko brought a different lens. She always wanted to be a teacher and never wavered on that growing up. The career did not materialize for other reasons, but when she entered the mortgage world and first watched BDMs at work, something clicked. “I saw the engagement, the professionalism, the education aspect. It was people-driven. That was everything I enjoyed.” Her advice is rooted in self-awareness: understand your skill set, know what energizes you, and recognize that this clarity often does not come at 18. “Don’t just look up. Look around. Learn all the different aspects of the business. It’s seemingly complex, but it doesn’t need to be if you’re learning how the world works.”
Walji tied it to personal brand, a theme she returned to throughout the roundtable. “Your brand is everything. You define it and shape it, but you have to stay consistent and true to it. You never know when you’re not in the room and someone is deciding whether to give you a seat at the table based on what you’re known for.” Robinson noted that she actively watches people at industry events as potential future hires. “There have been people I watched and thought, I would never hire them. Your brand follows you everywhere.”
Conroy sharpened the point: “Industry symposiums create visibility. I was at one yesterday, observing how people connect, contribute, and present their ideas. Those moments matter, particularly when organizations are actively hiring.”
It starts at home A lot of what women contend with professionally was set in motion well before their first job. Several of the panellists traced it back to childhood, and to what girls are taught early on about how to show up.
Allaire connected childhood conditioning to professional behaviour directly. “From when we were young, girls are supposed to be pretty, they’re supposed to be nice. Boys are supposed to be strong, they shouldn’t cry. This is ingrained from a very early age.” As a mother of two boys and two girls, she takes the responsibility seriously. “I want my boys to see women as their equals. There isn’t a predefined job description as a wife. My husband cooks. I do the barbecuing. He does the gardening.”
Steko traced her own willingness to take career risks back to what was instilled in her as a child and cautioned that the opposite is equally formative. “We were put in a box. There was an expectation and it was safe. If we don’t enable and encourage girls at a younger age, they carry that self-doubt into their careers.”
Conroy offered a reflection from her own upbringing that illustrated the point. After completing a women in leadership program focused on gender bias, she found herself revisiting messages she had absorbed as a child, including being told not to talk or dress too loudly. It is a dynamic she is determined not to repeat with her own children. “I don’t want them holding back because someone told them to be smaller.”
For her, risk has shown up more as a pattern than a single event. She talks about consciously becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable: leaving when it would be easier to stay and staying when it would be easier to leave. A recent example was pitching and delivering a conference presentation she could easily have declined. Even now, she says, the discomfort has not gone away, but the willingness to proceed anyway is what has moved her career forward.
Robinson shared a story her daughter still talks about. “When she was little, she mentioned a career option. I told her, no, you’re going to be the prime minister.” Her daughter ran for office at 22 with the Green Party. “You start this at home. You encourage them to think bigger, to see more possibilities.”
Walji took a lighter approach with her own daughter: “I just tell her, you won’t be able to afford to live downtown Toronto if that’s what you do.”
Where this leaves us The Canadian mortgage industry has no lack of talented women. It is short on the systems, cultures, and norms that let that talent rise at the pace it deserves. A 100-year timeline for boardroom parity is not a projection any of these leaders are prepared to accept. And based on how they lead, hire, mentor, and push back, they are not waiting for someone else to reduce it.
What holds women back in mortgage finance?
Women represent 45% of candidates for senior and middle management roles but only 25% of C-suite positions and 4% of CEO roles
Leaders argue retention, not recruitment, remains the industry’s biggest challenge
Flexibility around caregiving responsibilities continues to shape whether women stay and advance
Mentorship and sponsorship remain critical to long-term career growth
Women often undersell themselves during hiring and promotion processes
Pushback against the idea that leadership requires women to conform to traditional executive stereotypes
Career lessons from women leaders in mortgage finance
Career growth is described as “a jungle gym, not a ladder,” with lateral moves building stronger leaders
Personal brand and reputation matter long before formal leadership opportunities appear
Authentic leadership, empathy, and accountability are framed as strengths, not weaknesses
Executives describe risk-taking and discomfort as defining parts of their careers
Industry events and visibility continue to act as meaningful career accelerators
Confidence and ambition often begin forming long before the workplace, starting at home and through early conditioning
