Her Magazine is New Zealand’s only women’s business lifestyle magazine! Her Magazine highlights the achievements of successful and rising New Zealand businesswomen. Her Magazine encourages a healthy work/life balance.
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her cover feature for her advocacy of gender equity, social justice and work and family partnerships through corporate management policies and practices. "Acknowledgement is an interesting thing because it's always about something that has happened, often quite a while before," Ann muses. "The value of it is that other people thought you were worth mentioning. That's not why you do things, but I guess it was nice to have that – and of course my mother was chuffed!" The year 2002 saw Westpac appoint Ann as the first female CEO of a New Zealand bank, an appointment New Zealand was ready for – but only just! "It was a time when there were lots of women in positions of authority and power in New Zealand, less so in business, but much more in institutions," recounts Ann. "To me New Zealand felt much more open to the idea of a woman running a business. Of course what I found was that there weren't that many women in business." Ann mentions Telecom's Theresa Gattung as the other key female CEO of the time, in a business environment she describes as very gentile but still very male. It is Ann's aptitude for risk that has seen her manoeuvre across industries with apparent ease, taking advantage of "amazing" opportunities despite cautionary counsel from others. "Whether it was jumping from banking to cruise shipping, moving from Australia to New Zealand or going from government to the private sector, at every one of those key points most people thought I was completely mad. They were very forthcoming with their opinions! They were all risks, but they were calculated. I think if you don't take risk then life is probably nice and safe and secure, but other opportunities just don't open up." Now Ann's life is almost a world away from her childhood in Queensland's Gympie, where her opportunity for risk taking 20 | December/January 2012 | HER MAGAZINE was a little muted. "Gympie gave me a typical Aussie country town upbringing," she recalls. "We had horses. All the stuff you do when you grow up in the country. I have fond memories of a horse named Prince, an old racehorse that couldn't run all that fast anymore." Finding strong female role models outside the family circle was a futile exercise for Ann. She says it wasn't until she was much older that Australia provided strong women identities. "The strong women in my life were my mother and my grandmothers. They all worked in paid employment, which wasn't all that common at the time," reflects Ann. "Women in our household were not wilting flowers by any stretch of the imagination! A lot of my female role models when I was growing up were actually women overseas … women who were breaking the shackles." It's not really possible to mention women and work in the same sentence without inviting some discussion on the ever- elusive work/life balance. Ann says it's a concept that everyone defines differently and that evolves over a person's personal and working life. "I think there's a danger in talking about it as if it's this absolute place that you can get to, where your whole life is really ordered and you've got that image of balance with the kids and family on one side and work on the other, and it's all sitting there in happy equilibrium. I think it's a day-by-day proposition – actually it's hour-by-hour sometimes," she quips. The lines between Ann's own 'work' and 'life' are comfortably blurred. Ann is a founding Board member of Jawun, a non-profit organisation connecting corporate businesses with Indigenous communities. Companies second employees into communities that need assistance and skills, giving them the opportunity to develop businesses and become self-sufficient. "Jawun started