Miriam González Durántez wants girls everywhere to aim for the top. Here the wife of the former Deputy PM tells Samantha Laurie about the charity she has founded to encourage them
Each morning during the 2010 general election campaign, media advisors for the different political parties issued press releases stating where the spouses were going and what they would be wearing. Every day Nick Clegg’s wife supplied precisely the same information: “Tell them, Miriam is going to the office and wearing her own clothes.”
Just a few years on such questions seem more than a little absurd. And it’s thanks in part to this high-achieving, forthright lawyer. Possessed of strong opinions on the role of women in the workplace and fathers in the home – she famously interrupted her husband’s press conference to describe men who play an equal part in childcare as having ‘cojones’ – she is a weathervane for casual sexism, regularly taking to Instagram to upbraid the Daily Mail for its “poisonous” language – ‘Who wears the trousers?’ won a recent lashing – or to challenge lazy stereotyping.
“This background noise of sexism has a big impact, creating lots of the problems we see in gender discrimination and stereotypes,” she says. “Even at six years old children start viewing jobs as either female or male, and by 13 or 14 girls have questions about whether or not it’s possible to have a job and a family. I know that I certainly didn’t think like that as a teenager, so why should they?”
Five years ago, Miriam set up the charity Inspiring Girls, designed to connect teenage girls to strong female role models. Now worldwide, it asks women to spare one hour a year to talk to girls about their lives, exposing them to different industries, ideas and sports. Earlier this year, the charity linked up with London Welsh Women to attract more girls to rugby.
Already, over 25,000 women – old, young, senior, junior, professional mums, stay-at-home mums – have gone into schools to meet with girls. The message is not only that girls can make it to the top, but that those who get there aren’t so different to them.
Sometimes there’s a thunderbolt moment.
“We brought in a submarine pilot to talk to the girls about her life and they were like, ‘What?’ They couldn’t believe it,” recalls Miriam.
The biggest impact of all, she says, is when girls meet someone from their own local area.
“And it’s not necessarily ‘top top’ women. We have all kinds of speakers. Our aim is to open girls’ eyes to a full variety of role models, from all walks of life. We also do employer speed dating and career Thursdays – the aim is to make as much noise as possible.”
Nor is it only the girls that benefit.
“Lack of confidence is such a female issue. I have heard women, wonderful women in high-flying careers, ask: ‘But do the girls really want to hear what I have to say?’”
Growing up in a small rural village in North-West Spain, Miriam found her own role models in her mother, who taught physics and chemistry and was one of the few working women in the village, and her father, the first elected mayor of Olmedo, who believed strongly in economic independence for his daughters. As a young person living through Spain’s transition to democracy, she saw how far society could transform.
“When I was young, women couldn’t have a current account. Now we have Ana Botin who chairs the biggest bank in the Eurozone.
“What has changed in very recent times [in Britain] is that men are speaking up too. And this new generation is fantastic. I get to non-discrimination through a rational process, but young people have it in their DNA. As a society we must be doing something right.”
As the mum of three boys (Antonio, Alberto and Miguel), she’s often asked why she chose to set up a charity for girls. For her, it’s an odd question: feminism isn’t just about girls, she says, but about society.
“I don’t want my children to live in a society where girls feel second-rate, just as the fathers of those girls do not want their daughters to feel that way.”
Her feminism is full of European insights. In Spain, she tells me, there is much less of a debate about the gender pay gap, but a much bigger one about domestic violence. Our generation, she says, is the beneficiary of wider access in society and the workplace, but what is still missing is equality in the home.
“Women are expected to deal with care – for children, for elderly parents, for the home – and that leads to taboos around how it takes place. I go to meetings at 4.30pm, look around [at the men] and think: ‘Who is looking after your children?’
“We need a system that helps with care, or tackles it through taxation, and we need to speak up openly and start brainstorming solutions.”
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At Casa Clegg in Putney, childcare duties are evenly split. Since losing his seat in the 2017 election, Miriam’s (newly knighted) husband has also been funneling his energies into a ‘How to Stop Brexit’ handbook and public lectures, and has recently been linked to talk of a breakaway centrist party.
Ironically, Brexit means that Miriam has never been busier professionally: a top-ranking lawyer and partner in global law firm Dechert, she specializes in trade policy and is one of the few real experts in the nuts and bolts of Brexit negotiations. From her perspective, it’s not looking good.
“There is a feeling that not everything is being handled rationally. It’s like society has become a spectator and no one is able to change it. There are politicians looking at public opinion as if it’s something that happens to them rather than something they shape, while the business community is frustrated. It feels like [politically] there’s a lot of space in the middle for someone to take back control in a competent way.”
Even so, Miriam is passionate about Britain.
“From the minute I came here, I loved it. The tolerance, openness, variety: so few places are like this. I felt a freedom I had never felt before in my life.”
Partly, she believes, it is to do with the education system.
“In Spain or Brussels, if you want to be a lawyer you study law; if you want to be an economist, you study economics. Here the pyramid of university is so pointed – lots of people are trying for just a few places, so they choose different degrees. There are lots of ways of getting into certain jobs and that opens up society.”
It was in Brussels, on a postgraduate scholarship, that Miriam met fellow student and aspiring politico Nick Clegg, later joining him in London and setting up home in Putney. Here they stayed during Clegg’s tenure as Deputy Prime Minister, despite pressure to decamp to Whitehall.
Her intention, as always, was to keep the boys out of the headlines. But last year that became particularly hard when her eldest son, 15-year-old Antonio, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare form of blood cancer. The teenager found a small, painless lump in his neck and tests revealed he had lymphoma across his chest. Telling their son that he had cancer was one of the “toughest things we have ever done”, Miriam explained to ITV’s Lorraine show.
Now, after treatment that included chemotherapy, Antonio is in remission.
“Of course it was hard, but the good news is that it was curable. You think about it retrospectively because at the time there are too many things to do.”
At such moments, Miriam has frequently turned to cooking for comfort. As she recently revealed, throughout her husband’s spell as Deputy PM she and her sons wrote a secret online food blog, mumandsons.com, trying out different Spanish dishes. “When my husband’s advisors learn this,” she wrote with evident glee, “they are going to freak out!”
They didn’t (would they dare?) and now the recipes, interspersed with anecdotes and family chat, have become part of a cookbook, Made in Spain. Sales help fund the next stage of the Inspiring Girls campaign: to develop a digital library of self-recorded interviews from female volunteers.
“Changing the ways girls think about themselves does not require a massive revelation – it’s just all of us taking a little more care in what we say. Everybody wants to help…with the possible exception of the Editor of the Daily Mail,” she adds mischievously.
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