Nicola Mendelsohn tells podcast she felt her life could have been 'destroyed' by the discrimination she suffered at Manchester High School for Girls
August 25, 2022 09:26
A Manchester school has praised a prominent former pupil as “an inspiration” after she revealed she had confronted one of its teachers over antisemitism decades ago.
Nicola Mendelsohn, a vice president of Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, said she felt her life could have been “destroyed” by the discrimination she suffered at Manchester High School for Girls.
The former advertising executive, 50, who has been labelled “the most powerful British woman in the tech industry”, told The Diary of a CEO podcast: “I was told at school that I wasn’t very good, that I wasn’t very clever, that I wasn’t going to pass my exams.
Mendelsohn
“With hindsight, I think there was probably some antisemitism that I experienced at school, a few particular incidents that stick out,” said Lady Mendelsohn, who is married to life peer Lord Mendelsohn.
“I’m religious and I observe the sabbath, and that meant in the winter months that I would go home early from school, and we had a couple of teachers that would always insist on starting the new topics on a Friday afternoon.”
When her parents complained, Lady Mendelsohn said, they were told that if they insisted on observing shabbat it was not the school’s problem.
She said: “I had an English teacher who used to mark me down, and my marks were really low. I was like, two out of 10, three out of 10, I was in a good school and these were not my marks.
Meta vice-president Nicola Mendelsohn
