Fashion to financial markets: How Mahjabeen Zaman found her voice

Women on Boards: Leader, directors & subject matter experts in conversation with Claire Braund

Fashion designer, newsreader, banker, lecturer: Mahjabeen Zaman has had all these careers in her sights since growing up in Singapore in the 80s with her parents who moved there from Pakistan.

Now Mahjabeen, who has called Australia home since 2017, can add three of those four jobs to her resume. Currently working as a senior investments specialist after also running her own highly successful fashion label (and dressing celebrities) in Asia for eight years, multilingual Mahjabeen is passionate about ESG and sustainability, and how it is driving investment thinking, and lectures on the subject at Macquarie University.

She is also Chair of Women on Boards Cultural Diversity Committee, a mentor for emerging leaders and a graduate of the news organisation Bloomberg’s New Voices program which provides one-on-one media training for top women executives in finance and business.

In this podcast, Mahjabeen tells Claire her success is all down to setting milestones along the way every ten years. Despite her 40s target getting temporarily derailed when children came along, Mahjabeen has not veered far off her path. “Things that I aspired to but never thought would happen, have happened,” she says.

Mahjabeen puts her determination down to genes and watching her father build his own business up from scratch. Her family also fostered a love of travel and adventure, with Mahjabeen travelling to study at University of Exeter, UK, and then extensively around Asia and the Middle East while exploring emerging markets for Deutsche Bank, even picking up Bahasa - the form of Malay spoken in Indonesia - along the way.

In this podcast, Mahjabeen talks about how she has been very lucky to work with people from many culturally diverse backgrounds and why having a culturally diverse Board should not, under any circumstances, be ignored.

LinkedIn Mahjabeen Zaman | Claire Braund (host)

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