Our Shared Success: Black History Month & Beyond

By Michael Fraccaro, chief people officer and executive sponsor of LEAD, and Ron Green, chief security officer and executive advisor to LEAD

Our success is driven by our people.

And, more inclusive businesses are more successful businesses. That includes Mastercard.

With a diversity of viewpoints, we can be more creative, innovative and adaptive to our changing world—ensuring our network is more secure, our products are more relevant and our marketing messaging are reaching all people in a meaningful way. People of color make up more than a third of our U.S. workforce, and their contributions to Mastercard are immeasurable.

This month, we celebrated Black History Month with inspirational events, thoughtful discussion and connection-building across our teams—much of this activity led by our LEAD (Leading Employees of African Descent) business resource group. LEAD has been instrumental in shaping our talent recruitment efforts, recently forming a new advisory committee to help attract diverse talent in cybersecurity, technology, product development and other areas. In the dynamic and changing 21st century workplace, diversity is still an issue that not only influences our ideas of fairness and opportunity, but one that impacts performance and innovation.

To fuel the discussions around diversity further, we have been benchmarking our efforts and are now expanding this benchmark information to include median pay figures.

When we look at pay equity in the U.S., racial and ethnic minorities earn $1.006 compared to every $1.00 earned by Caucasian employees, based on our latest analysis of employees at the same level, doing the same role.[1] The median pay for people of color is 93.0 percent compared to the median pay for Caucasians in the U.S. We know work remains to be done and—in partnership with groups like LEAD—are committed to build a world-class, diverse team.

We’ll continue to focus on our U.S. recruiting efforts, with an emphasis on attracting and converting diverse slates of candidate that include people of color—and on creating a culture where all can thrive. The continued success of our people, and our company, depends on it.

February might be behind us, but the dialogue will continue.

[1] Pay equity figures based on action taken for the available U.S. employee population as of September 1, 2019. U.S. slate and hiring figures as of September 1, 2019; U.S. median pay figures as of March 1, 2020.