Nicola Mendelsohn, the British advertising executive named Facebook’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has been a strong force taking the industry by storm.
She has always been led by her Jewish heritage, with strong values instilled in her at a young age.
“I grew up in Manchester, England, in an Orthodox home in which my parents taught me about tikkun olam, giving to charity and helping people,” Mendelsohn told The Jerusalem Post. “It’s always been a fundamental part of my Jewish life, of my DNA and who I am. It’s something which motivates me in my day-to-day work and which I hope my husband, Jon, and I have instilled in our four children.”
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Mendelsohn had her start in a surprisingly different career path, studying English and drama for her bachelor’s degree. She was later inspired by a good friend to pursue advertising and quickly fell in love with the subject.“The creativity, the problem-solving, the innovation, are all skill sets that I have learned and that I continue to draw upon,” she explained. “I’m a believer that your job title doesn’t need to be ‘creative’ to be creative and it can be an integral part of any role. Using past experiences will always bring a new dimension to any role you take on.”
Mendelsohn, the daughter of kosher caterers who started a family business – Celia Clyne Banqueting – has not had it easy. In 2016, she was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, a rare and incurable form of blood cancer. The diagnosis did not stop her, though. She launched the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation (www.theflf.org) and continued her work.
“I feel grateful to be blessed with a life that I cherish and that there were not big changes that I wanted to make,” she said on the matter. “Work is a huge part of my identity and it’s something that gives me energy rather than saps it.”
The coronavirus pandemic surely has not helped her work, but Mendelsohn says it’s allowed for people to find creative ways to continue pushing forward while also bringing people closer with those they love most.“I know we’re not out of the woods yet,” she said. “But when I talk to business and community leaders, what I’m hearing most at the moment is optimism. An unmistakable sense of hope. And it’s not just about being able to see COVID in the rearview mirror for the first time for 18 months. It’s also about hanging onto the silver linings – the good stuff we’ve learned during an exceptionally challenging time.”
Mendelsohn said that she sees the current state as a “tech tipping point” in which “digital tools are at the heart of every sector and organization’s operations, and they’ve never mattered more than now.”
She expressed hope that the tech industry is slowly crawling away from “being seen as a ‘male industry’ rather than female” and that, in the future, more young girls “study STEM subjects at school and university, so that tech can be seen as a vocation for young women.”
ADI SOFFER TEENI has been pushing forward Israel as the Start-Up Nation for years – and, as Facebook Israel’s general manager, she has managed to create platforms for Israelis to push themselves forward in the industry on a global scale.
Teeni didn’t start in the tech industry – in fact, she’d been studying law when she fell in love with the concept of the Internet back in the early 1990s.
“As you can imagine, the new exciting phenomenon [of the internet] was just picking up, and I was already fascinated with it,” she told the Post. “At that moment I realized I didn’t want to be a lawyer, as the vision... of how for the first time technology will directly serve people in a way that will change our lives was just so exciting.”She told of her army service, where she served in the cadet school of the Israel Air Force, and how even then started to show a passion for data.
“This was really the first time I understood the power of data in the process of decision making in reality – and I was astonished by the idea of prediction models and the impact they can have on our lives,” she explained. “Little did I know that 30 years later, data and prediction models would be such a huge part of everything we do in the tech industry and of every part of our lives. Looking back on my service... I will say that the two-and-a-bit years in the army were the most important in my professional career.”The tech industry was heavily impacted by COVID, she explained, as there was an “increase of share of digital consumption” as well as “the emergence of totally new online products and services that were born during COVID” and a change in consumption patterns altogether. “Working at Facebook in Israel with the tech ecosystem during this period, we are seeing the industry reaching an all-time high in every metric,” she said.But Teeni made it clear: there’s still a long way for the tech industry to go.
“At the entrance point of the industry, and the market at large, women and men are at equal numbers,” she explained. “But as you move closer to the top... there are still very few women there. The first part of it is on us, women – to build that career path and make the right choices along the way to get there... The second part of it is on the companies we work for that have to make sure women and men are treated equally and given equal opportunities throughout their career path. And last, as parents, we have to make sure we are raising our daughters with the confidence to know they can do anything.”
She added, “We also have to raise our boys with the understanding that they need to play an equal role not only at work but also at home.
“I would love to be able to say that it’s getting better, but honestly – it’s not happening nearly fast enough. This is true in general, and in tech even more so.
To young women, she says: “Bet on yourself. Have the confidence to set ambitious goals and follow them and not be afraid to take on the roles that feel almost ‘too big.’ Invest in yourself with the support you need while growing a family and managing a career.”