Here’s a data point that speaks volumes: Companies that focus on creating a more diverse workforce outperform their non-diverse competitors on profitability and other business results by 39%.1 In fact, this performance gap has increased over time, making it clear that investing in diversity yields better businesses outcomes in the long term.
The relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance is now even stronger than before, as reported by McKinsey.2
Our journey
We begin with how we can impact the educational journey for young people, then move on to how we attract talent and develop our employees to thrive at Mastercard throughout their career, knowing that there are no inclusivity barriers to their success.
We believe that girls need to be engaged from an early age to ensure a STEM future that represents all of society. Mastercard’s Girls4Tech connects the foundations of our business to STEM principles and shows girls with all kinds of interests and skills that they can pursue a career in STEM. But there are invisible barriers and biases that we need to overcome. While there are growing opportunities in STEM, they aren’t always open to everyone.
To retain employees and attract the very best talent, we are making sure we have the right processes in place to support DEI efforts, first with gender and drilling down further to topics such as neurodiversity and accessibility. This is one of the reasons we continue to score highly on platforms like Glassdoor, where we were cited among the “Best Places to Work” in 2023.
Employees thrive when opportunities are unlocked for them, but we need to do more than just open doors; we need to encourage, to share, to drive participation. Our Women’s Leadership Network, a global community that helps Mastercard be the employer, brand and partner of choice for women, empowers female leaders at all levels in the business. This group promotes success stories, enables career growth and encourages entrepreneurial leadership. WLN offers tailored programs to women all across Mastercard’s global offices and unites members under a vision, a mission and regional business objectives.
Today employees and new talent want and expect more diversity in the workplace. Meeting this imperative not only influences our ideas of fairness and opportunity, but also sets us apart and contributes to our success as a business.
Attracting new talent
Developing our employees
Young female talent
Recoding our future:
Unlocking opportunity for women
DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
Our customers are telling us that DEI is a critical topic that will impact performance and we need to continue to be at the forefront of leading the discussion and delivering on our strategy.
As a global business leader, we have the power to open doors, unlock opportunity for others and lift people up as we climb. So two years ago we introduced Recoding our Future, a sequence of global events bringing together people from all walks of life, with a particular focus on gender diversity, supporting more women in the technology sector.
So what sets us apart from the crowd?
This series of global events focusing on women in tech kicked off in 2022 and has drawn leaders such as Steven Bartlett, entrepreneur and host of “Diary of a CEO,” and Jo Malone, British perfumer and founder of the companies Jo Malone London and Jo Loves, to attend our panels and discuss how they have implemented new and innovative hiring practices.
While our initial focus has been gender diversity in a traditionally male-dominated discipline, we are now looking to deepen our strategy to include neurodiversity, accessibility and ethnicity.
Back in 2021, women represented only 29% of the workforce in technology companies, with ethnic minorities at just 22%1
29%
12%
The data is still showing that the cybersecurity area has less representation of both groups, each of them representing only 12% of the workforce1
While much work remains when it comes to DEI, we’re excited to raise this awareness within the cybersecurity space and help our customers broaden their understanding of these efforts.
To learn more, please visit our DEI page
Learn more
1. https://solutions.trustradius.com/buyer-blog/women-in-tech-report/
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact
McKinsey’s data shows that diverse companies outperform non-diverse companies, but the C-suites and boardrooms of most Fortune 500 companies are still overwhelmingly white and male.2
Recoding our future: Unlocking opportunity for women
DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION