Crises and data breaches at work. She tells how her family has helped her through and why women are the future

they don’t want to share,” she says.

Has Facebook owned up to its responsibilities? Does it understand the power it wields in swaying public opinion in a political vote? It does, she says, “definitely. We’ve made changes post-2016 and that we continue to evolve in this area demonstrates our commitment and how seriously we take it, for sure.”

Among those are checks and verifications on advertisers, but also transparency around political ads. “You can go back to a page and see the ads targeting different audiences in different ways.”

It has upped its use of fact checkers, not only employing more specialist companies, but also hiring 20,000 extra staff to do this by the end of this year — “a very significant investment.” She reminds me that the company removed 30,000 “fake pages” during the French elections last year “because we were aware of [the problem], we were looking for it and we could work quickly to make sure those things were taken down.”

Compared with everything else that has happened to her this year, the disclosure that her husband Lord [John] Mendelsohn attended the Presidents Club Dinner — where the female waitresses said they were sexually harassed — and was asked to “step back” from Labour’s front bench, may seem just one of life’s smaller trials.

Was it a conversation at home? “Absolutely not. I was proud of the work.” She says he was there because she and he were co-presidents of the Jewish charity Norwood, which was a beneficiary of the money raised. What does she feel about the now-notorious dinner? “I’m not going to comment,” she says.

Today we’ve met in Facebook’s Euston offices, a glass building that gives all the appearance of being transparent. Mendelsohn says “openness” is one of the company’s “core principles”. But even the process of getting to the eighth floor is like an episode of Black Mirror, involving the signing of a non-disclosure agreement and a near-nuclear panic when it’s realised I am wearing the wrong colour lanyard (I must change to one that warns PRESS PRESS PRESS). Then there are follow-up phone calls from comms people asking me to drop sections of the interview and demanding to know the headline. Perhaps i t ’s inevitable that these tech companies, which start out as pioneering innovators, become, once successful, subsumed by corporate paranoia and bureaucracy.

There are questions about the way our teenagers use social media that I can’t get Mendelsohn to engage with. Many use the app long before they are 13. Hers started on their 13th birthdays, she says, so “I can’t speak for other kids.”

That said, her work encouraging working women is laudable. It was Mendelsohn who approached Wosskow, a fellow member of the Mayor’s Business Advisory Board, when she realised that women who were not in a “business community” were far less likely to grow their businesses. “We were always the people changing from heels to flats outside meeting r o o m s ,” laughs Wosskow. “She’s a professional with a lot of heart. You don’t often get someone in such a big role who would work with small businesses like ours.”

Wosskow, who founded AllBright members club last year, says the big challenge is to make the UK a better place for working women. In 2016 only 2.17 per cent of capital went to female founders and only one in six people in leadership positions in companies in the UK are women. Also, many more women say they want to start their own business than do. So AllBright is creating a space where women from different worlds can meet and learn from one another.

Mendelsohn says that AllBright will give the 13,000 women already trained “new training”. Such is the appetite for the initiative, “We made a commitment this year to train 50,000 women.”

Mendelsohn’s mother still works — her parents run a kosher party planning catering company. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me that I wouldn’t have worked,” she says. She can’t remember who picked her up from school, “It obviously doesn’t matter.” The lesson her parents instilled was that “People are people, [it] doesn’t matter what their title or position is. And, yes, they did teach me to dream big.”

⬤ To apply for a place on The AllBright Academy, please visit: www. allbrightcollective.com/academy