Mastercard boss walks the talk on gender
Mastercard’s president of international markets says businesses cannot just aspire to achieve a gender balance – they must take real action.
Ann Cairns is in New Zealand this week. She is responsible for all the company’s markets and customer activity outside the United States and Canada.
Cairns was the first woman to work on an off-shore oil rig when she started her career as an engineer in Britain 38 years ago.
In 1987, she moved to investment banking, had a stint leading Lehman Brothers while it was in bankruptcy, and moved to Mastercard seven years ago.
Cairns said that when she first joined the finance industry she was the only woman in her field.
Now, Mastercard’s staff is 40 per cent women around the world.
‘‘I’d love it to be 50 per cent … When I joined only a handful of women were running countries [for Mastercard]; now it’s 22 out of 80 around the world.’’
Women head Mastercard in countries including New Zealand, Colombia, Nigeria and Croatia. ‘‘That’s a nice way for the industry to be progressing.’’
Most people were open to the need for better gender balance, she said. ‘‘I often say to the guys: ‘You wouldn’t like to be in a social setting, out every night, with just men. It would be boring. Why would you want to live life like that in a work environment?’’’
Women were increasingly highly educated worldwide, she said, and not making use of that by allowing them to fully contribute to GDP productivity was a ‘‘waste of that good education’’.
With technology making it easy to work remotely, it was increasingly possible to achieve better work-life balance, she said.
Mastercard had introduced rules to ensure it was happening.
When a position needed filling, recruiters would start from a position of asking for a balanced number of male and female candidates.
‘‘Not all men or one woman and five guys but start with a balanced slate,’’ Cairns said. ‘‘It’s not about saying ‘I want a woman’ but ‘Let’s set things up so we get the right person and we’ve looked at a balanced group.’’’
The business had looked at every level in its own ranks, to make sure that there was pay equity. It had delved into the individual cases where there did not appear to be a balance. ‘‘You have to have checks inside a company.’’
Cairns said New Zealand had a good take-up of digital payment technologies such as contactless transactions.
‘‘I’ve been into shops and restaurants and everywhere I go [in New Zealand], I can tap my card. People expect me to do it. It’s obviously quite an innovative country.’’