temmuzcan via Getty Images Women have made serious headway in Canada's workforce over the past decade, and the financial services industry may have to rethink how it serves customers as a result, CIBC says.

Women have made serious headway in Canada's workforce over the past decade, so much so that in households with a working woman, they now contribute nearly as much as men, according to a new survey from banking giant CIBC. The survey concludes that the financial industry will have to "re-think" how it does business to address the differing needs of the increasingly important cohort of female investors. "In families in which there is an employed woman in the core-working-age demographic, women's earnings now account for a record-high 47 per cent of family income, almost double the share seen in the 1970s," economists Katherine Judge and Benjamin Tal wrote. Since the Great Recession a decade ago, the share of women in Canada who are in the workforce rose by a full percentage point, while among men it declined slightly. The largest increase came among women aged 55-plus, who saw a 5-percentage-point jump in participation.

CIBC Economics Women over the age of 55 saw a particularly sharp rise in workforce participation over the past decade, research from CIBC shows.

Women have also seen a lower unemployment rate than men since the last economic downturn, CIBC noted. But that doesn't mean the gender gap has been beaten in the workforce. Women continue to earn less than men in 95 per cent of occupations, the CIBC study found, in part because women are still likelier to be in low-income jobs than men. But since the recession, women have landed a larger share of higher-earning jobs, and account for about a third of all higher-paying jobs today, CIBC said.

CIBC Economics Research from CIBC shows the wage gap between men and women is shrinkingly slowly in Canada.

All the same, other research suggests that Canada continues to miss out on a great deal of economic potential due to the gender gap. Closing it would add $420 billion in additional value to Canada's economy over 10 years, a 2017 study from McKinsey Global Institute found. Watch: Iceland becomes first country to require proof of pay equity. Story continues below.