Empowering women at MAS Holdings

They say behind every successful man is a woman, but have you ever wondered who is behind a successful woman? Could the answer be “herself”? Well, if you talk to the 18 award winners at the MAS Holdings Go Beyond “Empowered Woman of the Year” Awards, that’s the answer you will receive.

Their determination and a little bit of assistance from their employer MAS Holdings have helped these women fulfil their dreams.
In a day and age when much is talked and little is done about women’s empowerment and equal rights for women, the Women Go Beyond programme was instituted by MAS Holdings to highlight the stories of women in the group who have faced and overcome great challenges in order to achieve excellence while balancing a successful career and personal life and to reward such women with the recognition that they deserve. Under this programme every one of the 17 apparel plants under the MAS umbrella offer a four point framework under the heads “Career Advancement”, “Work-life Balance”, “Rewarding Excellence” and “Community Action”.

Held for the third consecutive year, this year’s presentation ceremony was held on December 9 at the BMICH with about 1200 of the female workforce of MAS Holdings present. Although the programme is a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) project, MAS Holdings Chairman Mahesh Amalean said that they hadn’t been committed to fair work practices for the past 15 years, before it was known as CSR and attracted a lot of attention. “We didn’t call it CSR then but we did it as it was the right thing to do” he said.

According to Amalean “Women play a very important role in this business” which is proved by the MAS statistics. Females at MAS Holdings make up 92% of its workforce in the apparel division, forming the backbone of the company. Women also make up 80% of our customers,” he said.

Each woman’s story is one of determination and courage, standing testimony to how these women, coming from less than fortunate circumstances, have moved up in life as a result of their hard work.

They have all undergone traumatic experiences in the past but none of them allowed those experiences to hinder their progress in life. Instead of feeling sorry for themselves and waiting for a knight in shining armour to come along to rescue them, they went about their work, determined to help themselves. Take the case of Kanchana Herath who was the Empowered Woman of the year from MAS Casualline.

Left fatherless when her father went missing in the 1980’s insurgency, her mother went overseas to support the family leaving Herath to care for her sisters at the cost of her school education. Joining Casualline as a machine operator she has now moved to the position of a line examiner.

Believing in empowering their female workforce through sports as well as through knowledge, the company has stood behind its female employees who wanted to try their luck in what are traditionally considered “male” sports. MAS sportswomen have represented both the company and the country in sports such as rugby, boxing, wushu and boxing. Achini Weerasinghe, the Empowered Woman of 2006 from MAS Unichela has brought glory to the company and the country through her chosen sport of wushu. She joined Unichela as a trainee machine operator and is now the only female folder mechanic in the plant maintenance team. CSR projects such as this have also helped MAS Holdings to maintain a firm footing in the global apparel trade in today’s quota free era, despite the heavy competition from China, showing that CSR can also drive profits.