Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Ann Cairns, president of international markets at MasterCard. To read the complete interview, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

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What were some early influences for you?

I grew up in the northeast of England, in a small mining village near Newcastle. My dad was a shoemaker who originally made shoes for miners. I grew up in a period when Margaret Thatcher was closing down mines across Britain, so there was very high unemployment in my town.

That had quite a big influence on people living in the area because, as kids at school, you would be thinking, “What can I do to make the best of life?” You realize that education’s important and that you need to spread your wings. So that was a big influence.

I won a scholarship at the age of 11 to go to a British grammar school. The headmistress, a nun, had a chemistry degree from Oxford. She was very pro girls doing science. It was an all-girls school, and there were a lot of scientists in the school. It seemed pretty natural to me to go to university to do math.

Tell me about your mother.

She’s still alive. She’s 85, and she’s a very confident woman. She worked as a pharmacist’s assistant. She was quite scientific. And she’s also a very good singer, a soprano. My dad was a club comedian, too, so they were both performers. They would often do cabaret in the area at night.

When you went to university, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do?

None whatsoever. It was a time when, if you were well educated, you were in a position to get a good job, because only about 10 percent of the population went to university back then. I didn’t study math from a vocational point of view. I studied it because I loved the subject. I majored in pure math, actually, and then went on to do a master’s degree in statistics.

While I was doing my master’s, British Gas rang up the university and asked if anybody was doing statistics who could come into the research area and design experiments for physicists, chemists and engineers. The university sent me along for the job interview, and I got the job.

I became much more interested in the engineering side and offshore exploration. But first I had to pass a weeklong offshore survival course. The guy running it was an ex-Royal Marine. I was the only woman in the course, and he kept making me do everything first.

After about the third day, I went up to him and said, “You know, I’m really fed up with this. What’s this all about?” I told him it felt like discrimination. He said, “No. You’re such a little girl that if you jump off the platform, all those 47 guys behind you who are terrified are going to say to themselves, ‘Look, she’s just done it.’ ”

And were you O.K. with that?

I was, because I understood there was a reason he was doing it, and it was a positive one, not a negative one. He was not trying to show me up. He was trying to help make other people more confident about it. So that was O.K.

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To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews of hundreds of business leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.