‘We have many reasons to be hopeful for the new generation’
Miriam González Durántez’s charity unveiled its latest scheme to mentor girls last week. Anna Silverman met her
CAST YOUR MIND back to 2010 and you might remember Miriam González Durántez brought a bit of excitement to the coalition years. This glamorous, high-flying lawyer, who out-earned her Deputy Prime Minister husband, Nick Clegg, livened up politics – before the days when a minister resigned every week.
Now she’s swapped grey London for the vistas of sunny California, where Nick has a new job at Facebook. Today, though, she’s back in the UK to launch a digital hub for her charity, Inspiring Girls.
When we meet, she greets me with a firm handshake and dazzling Hollywood smile that must fit right in in her new neighbourhood of Palo Alto, where she, Nick and their three sons, Antonio, 17, Alberto, 15, and Miguel, 10, live in a $9m mansion.
On their move, Miriam, 51, took a job at international law firm Cohen & Gresser. I’m in their London office with Miriam – dressed in an electric blue power suit and bright orange stilettos – who bubbles with enthusiasm when it comes to her organisation’s work. Ask her about Nick or his new boss, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, however, and her charm and ease rapidly vanish. I get it: she’s sick of being asked annoying questions, especially the one about whether she will quit her job now that Nick earns more than her (a reported seven-figure salary as head of global affairs and communications at Facebook). As far as she knows, the same question was never asked of Nick when she
was earning more than him. ‘I don’t know if many men would be asked that question, but I know many women are,’ she says.
It’s a fair point, except I do have a few other annoying questions to ask, such as whether she and Nick are still in touch with David and Samantha Cameron. (Nick resigned as leader of the Lib Dems in 2015 after leading the coalition Government with Cameron for five years.) ‘I’m not, but that really has nothing to do with inspiring girls, it’s political gossip,’ says Miriam. She does, however, reveal she ‘certainly hasn’t’ read David’s recent memoir.
Pushing my luck, I ask whether she and Nick have been to the Zuckerbergs’ for dinner and ask how Nick finds working with the tech billionaire, but she warns there will be ‘a lot of silences’ if I stray from talking about her campaign, which last week launched an online hub that will connect teenage girls with female role models around the world. It works by enabling girls (or anyone who’s interested) to access interviews with ‘inspirational’ women, from Australia’s former PM Julia Gillard to lesser-known figures.
‘It’s about showing girls the enormous amount of things women already do and saying to them, whatever you choose to do in life, it’s very much your decision. Make sure you look around and decide without taking gender stereotypes into account,’ she says. This, she hopes, will help tackle the selfconfidence gap she believes girls suffer during adolescence – which she sees as part of the reason we struggle to do things like negotiate salaries and promotions later in life.
Often asked where she finds her own confidence, even she admits to feeling impostor syndrome sometimes. ‘I’ve handled very complex legal cases with tons of information and there have been times that I have been debating whether I can really do it. Then other times it feels completely natural,’ she says.
But isn’t it a little patronising to suggest it’s lack of confidence holding women back, rather than a system that has always been stacked against us? She agrees there’s more than one factor at play here. Women contribute hugely to the economy but society hasn’t figured out how to deal with the fact they also have children, she says.
‘There is no society response to how we facilitate that, whether it is through childcare or taxation. There is a whole political area of reflection – I’m not sure what the answer is.’ But, she adds, ‘the lack of self-confidence in girls is self-evident. There is no point in denying it.’
What about the recent boom in women going freelance, I ask. Statistics show there’s been a huge rise in female freelancers over the past 10 years. We often celebrate this with hashtags like #Girlboss and #Hustle, but is the real reason this is happening because traditional employment isn’t working for us?
She thinks the debate is more complex than that and isn’t necessarily gender specific, saying we’re seeing big changes to productivity models worldwide. ‘But yeah, a lot of things in society make it difficult, especially during the maternity years,’ she adds. ‘That we know. It doesn’t make sense to spend ages discussing the components of the many issues that affect the life of women. We need to start sorting every single one of them, so let’s get back to action.’
Away from the office, she and Nick are raising three boys in the midst of a crisis of masculinity. How does she ensure they turn out to be feminists? ‘If they live in a family where women don’t feel second place to men, they learn it as they go,’ she says. ‘It’s not only my children. We have many reasons to be hopeful for the new generation. They have it in their DNA.’
Although she stays tight-lipped about the time she spent close to the front line of British politics, she does express hope that her ‘wonderful’ friend Jo Swinson, who worked closely with Nick during the coalition and now leads the Lib Dems, will succeed in stopping Brexit. Carrie Symonds, on the other hand, she hasn’t been following. Still, she knows all too well what it’s like to fall victim to gender stereotypes and live in the media glare, finding paparazzi outside her home back in the coalition days.
‘The role of political spouse is much more traditional for women,’ she says. ‘[We know this now because] we’ve had a female Prime Minister. I tried to use that public attention to create something positive and, frankly, out of all that public attention, whether it was sexist or not, Inspiring Girls was created and I’m grateful we put something together that lasted.’
If there’s any lingering sense of irritation about the type of attention she received, she won’t dwell on it, preferring instead to create something positive from it.
‘All we ask is for women to spend 10 minutes recording a video for the hub, then you can choose whether you want to do a talk with girls as well, either remotely or face to face. You would have to be a bad person not to want to dedicate 10 minutes of your time to help the next generation!’
Visit videohub.inspiring-girls. com to get involved