How Facebook’s boss is facing up to cancer
It’s been a tough 2018 for Nicola Mendelsohn — while being treated for lymphoma, she’s been battling fake news
NICOLA Mendelsohn remembers “the beautiful moment” she realised her children thought it was “normal” for her to be a working mum. Her youngest son Zac, then nine, returned from school, perplexed. “Mum, one of t h e b oys a t school’s mum doesn’t work. How weird is that?” Mendelsohn grins. “I came home that night and just went, ‘Yes! Yes!’” She punches the air. “I did something right.”
Actually, Mendelsohn, who has four kids, doesn’t just work; she is probably the most powerful woman in tech in the UK today. She is head of Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the most senior member of staff outside Silicon Valley. Her pride in being a working mother — she is third generation; both her mother and grandmother ran businesses — has translated into her backing #SheMeansBusiness, a Facebook initiative that has helped boost the kitchen table companies of 13,000 women since its inception in 2016. Today she is teaming up with AllBright, an education and networking organisation run by Debbie Wosskow and Anna Jones, to help further promote these fledgling enterprises by giving skills sessions.
But first there is something else about Mendelsohn. I n Fe b r u a r y she announced she has follicular lymphoma, a type of cancer. Among the changes she would make, she said, were those to her working week. “I had stopped doing very early morning flights and went the night before. Given the kids were all older and technology is amazing, I could keep in touch in different ways.” Since starting treatment, “I am in a different place. I’m going to be much more in London now.”
Over the next six months she will have chemo and immunotherapy. “I am doing OK. It’s not easy. But I am focusing on getting better. I have an amazing team that can help me work through this. It’s very different to a month ago to how I am today because I am not physically strong enough to do the things I was doing, and I’m OK with that. I’m lucky to be at a company that is OK with that too.”
Alongside the drugs, she’s made her own changes, overhauling her diet, dropping sugar. Also “I make sure I walk every day. That’s really important when you’re having chemo. Not power walking, just gentle walking. Just half an hour.”
She is also pulling back from other work commitments. She has stepped down from the government’s Creative Industries Council, which “I’ve chaired for the last six years”. She stresses in an aside that this was after she did the sector a deal for £150 million. She’s also stepped down from her role as a judge on the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which she enjoyed.
This means she’s around the kids mo re . D o t h ey h e l p? S h e laughs. “There’s an occasional cup of tea. No, they have been really supportive, really lovely and I’m really lucky.”
To put this personal difficulty into a wider context, Mendelsohn has also been on the frontline of the fallout of Facebook’s very public hell this year. As Facebook grew from revolutionary digital disruptor to global media behemoth, it has faced an onslaught of criticism — from doing too little to help users distinguish f a ke news from the real thing to negligently providing a platform for terrorists, sexual predators, or Russian insurgents, to doing too little to safeguard personal information — especially after the company admitted that the now-defunct digital political campaigning firm Cambridge Analytica had received a haul of private data.
She employs the tactical corporate “we” when talking about Facebook. “It’s been a really hard few months,” she says, “but it’s really showed us the importance of making it clear what Facebook is, what it does, and how seriously we take all the issues around data protection and privacy and election integrity as well.”
It has introduced “a significant number of changes”, she says, “to, hopefully, reassure people. At the heart of everything we do is making sure people are in charge of the information that they have on Facebook. So we have made it easier for people to understand what it is and what is done with i t .” S h e s ays the company has created “new products”, such as “c l e a r h i s - t o r y ”, w h i c h means it doesn’t hold information on searches you make elsewhere on the internet. “We ’ v e m a d e it easier for people to go in and do a privacy check-up and see where it is and to create the controls on what they want to share and what