The first female engineer to work on offshore oil and gas rigs in the U.K, knows what it’s like to be the only woman in sight for hundreds of kilometers.
In her twenties, mathematician Ann Cairns was quite literally thrown in the deep end, working on British Gas rigs in the remote North Sea in the early 1980s.
“It started off with designing pipelines, testing them, blowing up the pipes and seeing what pressure they’d burst at,” said the mother-of-one, originally from Newcastle in the north of England.
Decades later, Cairns’ office is far more conventional — though no less demanding. She is now the President of International Markets for credit card giant, Mastercard, overseeing 5,000 employees in over 200 countries.
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