NICOLA MENDELSOHN
THE FOLLICULAR LYMPHOMA FOUNDATION
In 2016 Mendelsohn was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, a form of blood cancer for which no cure has yet been found. She recalls: “When
I was diagnosed, people said to me: ‘Don’t worry, there are so many advances in medicine. There will be lots of treatment options.’ But many of these are based on 30-year-old medicine.
This is partly because the disease has not been paid much attention. Even though it’s the second-most common type of non- Hodgkin lymphoma, very few people know about it. I’m now the co-admin of a Facebook group called Living with Follicular Lymphoma. This has 5,900-plus members.” In 2018 Mendelsohn found that her cancer
was in remission. Despite this, she says: “Having seen the challenges of how you live with this disease, I felt it was something that needed to change. So I have set up the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation. Its sole aim is that it shouldn’t exist. We want to find a cure and we should do it as quickly as possible.”
Visit
facebook.com/follicularlymphomafoundation for further information
HAVE AN EYE FOR DETAIL Often it’s the little
things that make a big difference. Watching out for people’s biases in meetings is a really good thing – do the women end up doing housekeeping tasks such as pouring the coffees, for instance? So many things that happen in an office, from ordering drinks to organising birthday celebrations, fall on a woman. Often it takes a male boss to say: “Hold on. I’ll ask someone else to do that.”
CHAMPION THE BUSINESS CASE
So much research has been conducted which proves that if you have more diversity in your organisation – especially among its leadership team – the business will perform better financially. Take the 2018 study by INvolve and the Centre for Economics and Business Research, for instance [which found that “firms with the most developed diversity policies are 15 percentage points more likely to financially outperform their national industry mean than those with the weakest diversity policies in place”]. If you have an all-male
board, or all of your directors have similar backgrounds, your business simply won’t do as well as it could. Addressing diversity makes sound business sense.
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