Melinda Gates Speaks to VOA About Women's Empowerment

Thanks for having me.

Well, I have met so many women and families over 20 years of foundation travels to many, many countries. The stories these women have shared with me about their lives have called me to action, and I wanted to write a book that would call others to action. Because I believe that equality can't wait. When we make women equal in society, it lifts up their family and society, and we need to make sure that we really get true equality for women all over the world.

To me, equality for women shows up when they have their full voice and their full decision-making authority in their home, in their community, and in their workplace. If we can make sure women have that, you will have true equality in society for all women.

Well, when I was a little girl, my dad was an Apollo engineer, and he worked on that first mission that went up to space. My sister and I would get to be in our jammies late at night watching that rocket take off. I loved that moment when the engines were ignited, the earth was shaking and rumbling, and that rocket would lift off against the forces of gravity that pushed it down and head off to the moon. I thought about women and all the barriers that hold us down in various societies. If we could remove those barriers, we would get this moment of lift for women and men all over the world.

Well, I see so many women that, if we allow them as a world to have access to contraceptives, what we know from societies around the world is: once a woman has access to contraceptives, she can time and space the births of her children. She can continue her education, she can work in the workforce if she chooses. Her kids are healthier, she's healthier, the family's wealthier and better educated. So that barrier—every society has to make the transition through contraceptives first. If women have access to contraceptives and their kids have good health, the next barrier you have to remove is education, because when women are educated, it changes absolutely everything in their family and even the decisions they make in the world.

Yes, so I was meeting so many women around the world. I would be there to talk about vaccinations for their children, which they were thrilled to talk about. They said, 'You know, I walked ten kilometers in the heat to get them. I know the difference.' But when I turned the questions and let them ask questions of me, they would say, 'But what about my health? What about that contraceptive that at this little clinic I can get vaccines, and I used to be able to get contraceptives, and now I can't?' It was through these rallying calls from women—saying, 'Why isn't the world allowing us to have these anymore?'—that I came to learn and realize the difference they make in women's lives. Two hundred million women are asking us as a world for contraceptives. It's a very inexpensive tool. We use it in the United States—more than 90 percent of women use it in the United States and in Europe. Yet, if we don't allow women to have that tool, we don't provide it, they can't lift themselves out of poverty. So I started to realize that was a really important piece of the work.

I think by other women sharing the stories of their lives. I would often be coming back from various countries in Africa—Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Senegal—and as I was flying home, I kept thinking of all these barriers I would see holding women down in Africa. I went across the continent, and I would think, 'Oh, if women could only have this barrier removed or that.' But it was then that stories helped me turn the question back on the US and say, 'How far are we really in the United States?' OK, we've made some distance, but less than 25 percent of people in Congress are women, less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. If a woman wants to start a business in the United States, less than two percent of venture capital funding goes to women-led businesses. So they helped me see a call to action—what needs to get done around the world, not just in their own countries and where we can help and intervene, but really in our own country too, the United States.

Yes, so in this book, even though I'm incredibly private, I decided to be pretty vulnerable—quite vulnerable—and that was not an easy decision. But I share stories of my own personal journey because they are also the stories of millions of other women. So this story that I do tell of abuse that I experienced: it silenced me, I lost my self-confidence, and we know millions of women around the world are in relationships where they're being abused. Women tell me about it when I go into villages. I hear about sexual harassment in the workplace in many places in the United States. It's a spectrum, but any type of harassment holds a woman back. It pushes her back into her corner, and she doesn't get her voice or she doesn't feel confident to take a decision. So I chose to share a story like that—and my own climb to equality—to let everyone know it is possible.

Feminism is when a woman has her full voice and her full decision-making authority wherever she is in her life—in her home, in her community, and in her workplace. If she has her voice and can take any decision, then she is fully empowered. And if you believe that, then you are a feminist, in my opinion.

Yes, so the foundation has been in existence now for over 20 years. I think the most important thing for everybody to know is we work in partnership. There is nothing the foundation has ever done without being in full partnership with others, and particularly with governments and citizens on the ground in various countries. Philanthropy can be this catalytic wedge—we can try things, we can experiment where you wouldn't want a government to do that with taxpayer money, but if we can prove things out and measure it, then we can ask government to scale it up. I think one of the foundation's biggest successes has been in vaccinations. Why is childhood death down cut in half since 1992? Enormous reasons: vaccinations and malarial bed nets. We're part of two large-scale partnerships to try that. We have worked to scale up vaccines in many countries in Africa and all over the world, to make sure that malaria bed nets through the Global Fund are distributed to women who sleep under them—and how to keep their kids under them. It keeps them alive.

I'm incredibly frustrated and I'm saddened to think that a global health issue that we have solved in the United States has come back because parents have believed misinformation. No child should have measles in this country. No person who is immune compromised should in the United States be affected by someone else because a parent has chosen not to get the measles vaccine. These are life-saving tools. Women tell me all over Africa they walk ten miles in the heat to get vaccines because it saves their children's lives. So I'm saddened to see this in the United States, and I hope it makes people realize how lucky we are to have vaccines in our country.

Well, everywhere we work—for instance on the continent of Africa—each country is different, and there are many, many cultures inside of each country. So what we can do, the way to work, is to go—or what we've chosen to do—is to work with partners who have been on the ground, often 30 or 40 years, living with villagers. Villagers and people from the community are part of those partners. What you do is come in and see where the community is at, what they're trying to learn, what their requests and needs are. Then you start to bring in some education around the things they care about, and some information about tools we have here in the United States like contraceptives. When you're in a trusting relationship where the villagers start to believe and understand some of the education you've brought in, they will start to ask for those tools. So we do all of our work in that cultural context in a hopefully appropriate way.

Family planning is the greatest anti-poverty tool we have in the world. When a woman can time and space the births of her children, her family is healthier—her entire family—the kids are better educated, and the family is wealthier. I met a woman named Mary Ann in Korogocho, a slum in Kenya, and she summed up this family planning conversation that we'd had. There were about thirty women there, and at the end after two hours she finally said—she had this beautiful baby girl in her arms, a newborn—she said, 'I want to give every good thing to this child before I have another one.' I thought, 'Yeah, that sums up how parents feel about their children.' We want to time and space when we have children so we can bring every good thing to our child and then have another one.

Again, we go in and work with partners, and we say to men: 'If you want your children to be healthy, you need to think about certain things that your wife is doing. The amount of unpaid labor she does—the amount she chops wood, carries water, cooks the meals. If you're willing to think about that and to take some of that burden away from her, she will actually be better off and your kids will be better off.' The only way to do that is to again work with partners who are from the community and on the ground, and then have the village look at the tasks that women and men do, have an open conversation over time about that, and then commit to change. When you do that—I've actually seen this in Malawi—the men become champions. They say, 'My gosh, my whole house has changed because I'm carrying water now and my wife isn't,' or 'I'm chopping the firewood and she has more time for these other things.' So that's a conversation we need to have all over the world, even in the United States. Women do 90 minutes more of what we call unpaid labor in our homes than men do. Some of it is loving, caring work we want to do—caring for our loved ones—but some of it is just chores, right? So we need to look at that 90 minutes—even in the U.S., or six hours more that a woman does every day in India versus her husband—and say, 'How do we redistribute the workload so women can do the other things, the productive work they want to do in their lives?'

Absolutely, it needs to. I mean, when we think of that paid labor versus unpaid labor, we didn't for a long time even measure this unpaid labor. That's because—let's go back in time—economists were predominantly men. It's a very male-dominated field, and so they chose to measure what they knew, which was productive labor. But I would tell you—and what I see from the research—is that our economies are built on the backs of this unpaid labor that women do all over the world. That's also productive. We want somebody taking care of the kids. We want things to happen in our homes. But men and women need to look at that. I am so encouraged by this next generation that I see coming up, where many young men—particularly in the United States and in Europe—have been raised under moms who work. The way they look at the work in the home is that they know when they come into the partnership or the marriage, they're going to do half the work.

Yes. What I would say to everyone in the world is that equality can't wait. Our societies are better off when we have equality. Men will actually tell you—I've met men in Kenya and Tanzania and Malawi who've done this, looking at the redistribution of labor in their homes. I meet men in the United States who say, 'Hey, I'm actually helping do things I didn't do before.' What they start to see is that they're happier, and their families are happier, their wife is happier. What I've learned from men around the world is, they'll say—particularly in countries that have paid family medical leave for a long time like Sweden—'I want to be there at the birth of my child and to take care of my child. I want to participate in that, and my society values it. We have paid family medical leave so I can take care of the kids or take care of my aging parents.' To me, that's enlightened men, and that makes a better society.

I think I know: there are still people dying of preventable diseases, and every one of those lives—what I want people to know—is a tragedy. When there is generosity from the developed world in conjunction with African nations putting in some of their own taxpayer monies, you start to move societies forward. In the United States, less than 1 percent of our foreign aid budget goes to countries all over the world. What you do is you create peace and stability in those places, and families lift themselves up. So what I want people to know is we need to continue to make those investments because many of these deaths from those diseases are needless health emergencies in a family, and they affect families.

If you empower women, they empower everybody else around them. So if we want healthy societies, we lift up all women. The goal is not just equality—the goal is a better human race with more connection. That's the message of the book.

Thank you.