TomorrowTalks with Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to do this talk about my book. Let me just talk for a minute about why I wrote the book, and I think that might set us up for this next question. I've been lucky enough for the foundation for over 20 years now to be able to travel, not so much this year during the pandemic at all, but before that, I've met so many people in so many places around the world, whether it's Bangladesh or I'm out in a rural village in Tanzania or I'm somewhere in Senegal. I would sit and talk with people about their lives, and they'd open their homes to me or their community, and these women just really had these stories about their lives that moved me, and they animated my life and my work. I felt like if they were willing to share their lives with me, then I ought to be willing to take their issues to the global stage, because they would so often be telling me about things that they were hoping would change in their community. I think that really comes at the heart of what the foundation does, and the values that we live by, which is we are trying to solve these global inequities. Only by solving inequities and really acknowledging the gaps in society and how we view one another are we going to be able to get at these things to really build the world that we want, whether it's the democracy in the United States or whether it's in another country. And yet, I think so often we don't want to face those inequities because the issues are hard, or somebody doesn't look like us or doesn't live in our neighborhood. And yet we have to embrace one another because none of us are exactly the same, and yet we're more alike than we are different, and I think sometimes we forget that as human beings.

Well, I believe in connection, connection between human beings. When you have a deep connection with somebody, you feel it, it resonates in their eyes, it resonates in your eyes, and those are these moments, these sparks that go off. If we didn't know it before how connected we are, the pandemic has certainly shown us that, because this virus has traveled around the world. And yet when you ask people what they most deeply miss during the pandemic, they will tell you it's connection with a loved one or somebody they care about. So I think when we have connection with others, we can have more empathy for one another's positions or situation, and that really is the basis then for love, and for me, I hope for others, action on behalf of others. I was lucky enough to go to a school, my parents, I come from a Catholic family, I write about that a little bit in the book. My parents sent my siblings and me K through 12 Catholic school, high school I was lucky enough I went to an all-girls school but run by very liberal nuns, and they really taught us that each of us can make a difference in someone else's life. Sometimes it's in ways that feel very small, but they really aren't. When you put a drop in the pond, it's like a ripple goes out. Sometimes that's connecting with somebody and lifting someone up, sometimes that's helping with a need that they have, sometimes it's lifting up more than one person, maybe a hundred people. But that really is at the heart of what I believe about connection and empathy and love.

When I would be out traveling, so often I would be in these communities and I was there to talk about vaccinations for children, which is something the foundation works on, or maybe supplies in the local health clinic. But I would also ask the question of women like what the other issues were, or if I left enough time once we talked about vaccinations, women kept bringing this conversation around so often to contraceptives. I kept thinking that's odd, whether in all these different places I was in the world, and I started to realize that the more I listened to women, the more they were saying to me, "Do you not see this?" One woman said to me, "Do you not see this is a crisis for me? I have five children. Look at my tiny plot of land. My husband's gone in the city to try and find a job. I can't eke out a crop barely on this land and feed these five children. It wouldn't be fair to them for me to have a sixth child." But she said, "Look at that little health clinic over there. I used to be able to go there and get contraceptives, and I can't. And it's a crisis for me." She opened my eyes to what women were telling me around the world over and over again. Think about it: if a woman doesn't have access to a contraceptive, if she can't space the births of her children and decide how many she will have, we are locking her into a cycle of poverty. So if you flip it back to us in the United States and you think about women in the United States, what allowed more women to go to university and then get a job in the workforce? The birth control pill. We don't often think about these contraceptives that we sort of take for granted in the United States that men and women use. We use them so that we can decide when and whether to have children. For myself, it had to be personal for me. I had to say, okay, I needed contraceptives to stay in university, to then go on and have the career and then have the three children I would like to have when I had them. But what I've come to learn is that contraceptives is one of the very first things, it's not the only thing, but it's one of the first things that unlocks empowerment for women or girls because then they can get educated and get the job they want and have the productive life that they want. Conversely, if you don't allow that tool or you don't allow a woman to have it or to take that decision for herself, you are literally leaving her in poverty because she then will have child after child after child with no means to decide if and when. We have to make these connections that so often we don't want to make. What I'm learning is that so often because women haven't had the power or the resources, we often as a globe, if it's a prime minister or president, I used to show up at these meetings at the UN ten years ago, people didn't want to talk about the gender issues. It was almost like that was a side issue. No, that's actually the central issue. Because who feeds children around the world? Women. Who makes sure they're educated? Women. When she gets a little bit more income, she actually spends it differently than her husband spends it. Women are the center of the family, and we need to empower them if we're really going to change things.

We're a very heady place. We're all about science, we're getting the next vaccine, we're getting the next HIV drug. Well, guess what? Who takes the children to get the vaccinations? Quite often it's the mom. Who's most affected by HIV on the continent of Africa? Young adolescent girls in South Africa and many other places in Africa. But if we can't get the tool that she can use into her hands, we're not going to change the face of AIDS. So even inside our own shop, we had to get people used to talking about gender, and now they're realizing how central it is to their strategy if they're going to carry out the work all the way.

Sure. After high school, I went to Duke University, got an undergraduate degree in computer science. I think it's important to just pause here and say that for my parents, I had three other siblings, so putting four of us through college wasn't easy, and so I really valued my education. I went three years undergraduate, two years of business school, and I got scooped up by Microsoft at age 23. It was the first time they recruited at Duke. I got scooped up into their first MBA class at Microsoft, and when I joined the company there were less than 1,700 employees, so it was still a very small company. I worked there for nine years. I learned a lot. We were changing the world, is what we believed, and we knew it. It was before there was Windows, before there were word processors in an Excel spreadsheet as we know it today. I had a nine-year career there, and then I left at the birth of our first daughter. I had met Bill early in the company, after we got married I left at the birth of our first daughter because I really felt like I wanted to make sure that we could raise a family, and Bill was CEO of Microsoft and very hard charging and traveling a lot. But I also knew I still wanted to be a professional woman, and so very quickly thereafter we had already begun the foundation, but I started to become very, very involved in it. I started traveling around the United States to learn about some of the issues of inequity. Now I've worked at the foundation for well over 20 years. I didn't want to be full-time at the foundation until our last daughter started preschool, and I was lucky enough to not have to do that. Now it's more than full time, and I've been there as the foundation has grown and expanded. It is my life's work, and I absolutely love it.

Well, first of all, I call myself a horrible perfectionist. If you had met me six years ago, I don't know, somehow I got this silly notion somewhere along the way that I had to be perfect at things. The opposite is true. Once you start to look at my own perfectionism and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm spending way too much time preparing for things, way too much time reading a script for something instead of just going there and being myself." As soon as I started to become more myself and speak off the cuff, or say in a meeting at the foundation, "Could you stop again and explain that? I didn't quite understand that. I don't have a biology background," and I'm sitting there at a table of scientists talking about biology, but what I find is often when I ask a question, then other people are willing to say what they don't know and ask a question, and then we're all there creatively working together. I've had to really look at my perfectionism, and I have learned to laugh at a lot of the mistakes I've made, even during this COVID time, even more during this COVID time have I made mistakes. I've been on Zoom calls or Microsoft Teams where I've taken over the slides inadvertently, and there are three dozen people on the video and no one wants to say, "Melinda, you've taken over the slides, click them back." I have to say, "Oh wait, that was me, and I don't know how." The more you can sort of laugh at yourself and ask for support, you sort of allow others around you to be imperfect. We're all imperfect. I learn my best in safe environments, and I try to create safe environments for other people to learn by showing what some of my weaknesses are.

Absolutely. I think so often, one of the reasons I want to have so many more female leaders in the world is that we both take and make different decisions because we see different parts of society sometimes than men see. But I think so often girls look up and they see a female leader, they may think, "Oh my gosh, she's always been good at teaching, she's always been good at presenting or writing a manuscript." No, you've had to learn that. I know young women look at me and say, "Oh, she's always known how to do this." No, are you kidding? I think I even talk about in the book the first speech I did. I was so nervous. Bill and I were doing a speech together, but he was going first and I was going second. I tell the story in the book: I made him leave the hall where we were because I was so nervous because I didn't want to speak in front of him. He got in the car and he drove around the building several times and came back and picked me up when I was done with my part. Now when I speak with him, I'm like, "Move over honey, I've got something I want to say." But it's an evolution to become a leader.

I think this is why it is so important for women to speak up, or anyone to speak up. I tell the story in the book, but I would so often, it's also what society does to us. So often I would go as a co-chair of the foundation early on, and Bill and I would walk into a leader's office, a president or prime minister, whomever, and they would throw out a question and the first person they would turn to to answer it was Bill because they assumed he had all the knowledge. It was this sort of bias they had. Yes, he's known as smart, he's known as starting Microsoft, but guess what? I know just as much about the foundation's work. So I had to learn to speak up early and often, and then people started to realize, "Oh wow, she knows a lot about these topics and has similar points of view to her husband but even different ones." Without my voice, we wouldn't have gone as far as we are going now on these gender issues as a foundation, and quite frankly we wouldn't have been as effective.

I think if we don't hear one another, we don't really know what's needed or how we might help or create change in our home, in our society, in our communities. What Hans taught me, Hans Rosling was an epidemiologist and a global health expert out of Sweden. He's passed away in the last few years, but he continued to be one of my teachers because he and his wife had worked in several countries in Africa and he'd been a doctor on the ground. He had learned the importance of listening to people, and he would tell me stories of what he'd learned as an early doctor that helped inform me of how I should listen more when I would be out in these communities. Somebody else I really like is Brené Brown, and she talks about how statistics are really human beings with their lives and their stories. We can't just in global health or in any issue in the world look at just the statistics. The statistics often point to where to go or where the problems are, but without understanding the nuances in people's stories, you'll make mistakes and you won't act in the right way. I believe this power of storytelling and listening helps us see things in a different way, it helps us open our hearts. It's people's stories we first connect with, and then we have to look at the global statistics and see if they're there to know where to act. The other thing I've learned though is, as I said, I would be out listening. I would go on these trips in the developing world and I would hear these women's stories, but like take the case of contraceptives where they're asking me over and over for contraceptives. I'd come back and read the global statistics, and the global statistics back then said contraceptives are stocked in, so you wouldn't think we had a problem. When you looked deeper in the statistics, it turned out condoms were stocked in because of the AIDS epidemic, but women will tell you all over the developing world, "I can't negotiate a condom even in my marriage because if there's AIDS in the community, I'm either suggesting my husband's been unfaithful or I've been unfaithful." We weren't actually collecting the statistics about the contraceptives that women were using and wanted. I bring this up because this is true about so many women's issues all over the world. We haven't collected the statistics because the statisticians or who's moving the money to the statisticians to collect the data in the past 100 years was men. They would go in and sometimes even the questionnaires would be unintentionally biased. Without those statistics, we don't actually know all the ways to intervene on behalf of women's lives, and the same is true for minorities. Those are statistics we need to gather and stories we need to gather if we're going to know how to act.

Oh absolutely. COVID-19 has stopped a lot of progress dead in its tracks. So where the world had been in decline on poverty year over year, it's now on the rise, and it's particularly on the rise for women. And it's women all over the world. Even if you take women in the United States, 275,000 jobs were women's jobs that were lost last year in the United States versus 71,000 male jobs. Two-thirds of the jobs lost in South Africa were held by women. So poverty is on the rise. Vaccinations were halted for a while in many of the countries that we work in; those are back working now. But yes, much of our work was stopped in its tracks and set back, and that's work we will have to continue and further on. The foundation, while we continued our work and made some pivots, we also worked very hard on these COVID-19 vaccines because we are part of that global ecosystem with the pharmaceutical companies, with scientists, with the disease modelers. So Bill and I committed an additional $1.7 billion this year for COVID-19 specifically because we want to make sure that tests, drugs, vaccines, and more oxygen and supplies get out to low-income countries because they're suffering just like we're suffering here in the United States. They're losing loved ones, and yet so often the world takes care of the high-income countries and the middle-income, but we leave behind these low-income countries. That shouldn't be. Morally it's wrong, but economically we're not going to get a global recovery if this virus keeps bouncing back and forth between our borders. So that's an additional piece we've done. And then as we look forward, absolutely the world has to prepare for another pandemic because it's not a matter of if, it's when. Yet if we have a pandemic preparedness system, the surveillance system, a group of people who can immediately respond, if we're working on vaccines already and have a stockpile with some of these variants of things that are coming, we actually can attack the virus much more locally and keep it contained versus letting it emerge and break out around the world. But we have a short memory as a world, and so we're quite involved already in thinking about pandemic preparedness with a number of governments.

Definitely.

Well, I think this year has just been hard. It's been hard on students, it's been hard on teachers, it's been hard on families who've lost loved ones. So we're going through an unprecedented time, and I have to say the resilience I've seen among students this year has just blown my mind. Many working from home from their computers, from their bedrooms. They'd like to be on a college campus but they can't, or maybe they're in an apartment off campus. And my heart really goes out to the many students who don't even have access to Wi-Fi or a good broadband connection or a computer. There are some opportunities that this time has presented to us. ASU's been on the forefront—and I'm not saying this in a gratuitous way at all—on the forefront of digital learning and on how to bring people no matter what their zip code to a campus and help them get all the way through college with the supports they need, because they can get a degree and a degree makes an enormous difference in terms of getting a great job in our economy. Digital is here in a way that would have taken us as a nation probably another decade to get there in U.S. education, and now we need to take advantage of that opportunity. We're shifting some of our strategies in K-12 to take advantage of that time. There are great ways to do advising of students. Students who maybe live in a home where no one tells them they could go to college, no one explains how to fill out the FAFSA form, no one says to them there are scholarships available. If you start with a student freshman year and give them great advising, they can absolutely make that entire pathway on to college and get a good credential. So there are opportunities there. There are opportunities for much better online curriculum than we have today. We're seeing some bright shining lights in curriculum, but those need to be spread, there need to be more of them. We can use digital to really assess where students are so teachers can intervene. So those are some of the things that the foundation is already involved with and looking at. But we're really interested in how to make sure every low-income student has the opportunity to make it all the way through the K-12 system and on through college, because that's how they're going to get a great credential to then get a great job in the economy. And there are a lot of loss points there, and we look at those loss points and how to intervene. Lastly, I would say your question about ASU—I think you're already doing a lot to make sure that students can come there no matter what their preparation is. Maybe they had terrible Algebra 2 in high school; that's one of the big loss points. Students who come in and need to remediate algebra to go on with their nursing studies or to be an architect—helping students understand that if they've missed some learning because they didn't have a great teacher or they didn't understand the concept, they can absolutely catch that up and still make their way through calculus and be an engineer. That's really important, and I think you all have found ways to do that. And no matter whether the student had no one at home supporting them, no matter whether they're white or Black or Latina, they can make it in any career they want to. And I think that's the society that we're trying to build. And as you all talked about civic engagement too, getting kids to think about civic engagement and our democracy and what they all want from our democracy and what they should expect.

Thanks for that question, Jessica. Yes, there were definitely some of the stories. Because some of the women that I speak about there, when I would be talking with them, they were in very difficult circumstances. So one of the women I talked about, Marianne, who said she wanted to bring every good thing to this child before she had another. When I followed her back to where she lived, it was very sad circumstances, and the way she was keeping her income up was to do laundry for other people. And that wasn't easy for her because not every day could she get access to clean water to do that, or did she have customers. So when you take those stories in and you hold them, they are hard. But I think they're important to go back to because they remind you of the circumstances of people's lives. So yeah, thanks for the question.

Gosh, so many, Reagan. It's more like I've had all these moments that sort of add up to one. But I'll tell you one that might surprise you a little bit. We had former President Carter at the foundation early on when we were just starting, a very small organization. And I said to him, "President Carter, is there something we should know now that he took you a while to learn, that we should know now so we don't make that mistake?" And he said, "Oh definitely. You should know that anything you're trying to do, let's say in a community to use an example in Africa, you need to know that people have to see it as their work. If the community doesn't buy in and own it and see it as theirs and want it, you can do all this great work but as soon as you leave, they're going to go back to doing what they want." And this came to light for me to your question about feminism. I was in a village in Mali, and there was an organization that was trying to teach the women that putting a new emollient on their baby's umbilical cord would keep the children more safe than putting shea butter on the children's umbilical cord, and that the kids would get less germs and it would be more safe. Well, as soon as the organization left and then they came back three days later, what had the community done? They'd returned to doing the shea butter. Whereas when the nonprofit was there, they were doing what the nonprofit had asked them. And when they asked the women why, the women said, "It's because this is what we've done for generations, and you're not respecting what we've done and why we've done it." And when the organization finally realized a way to teach the women how to make an equivalent emollient out of shea butter but with some other things to make it safe for the babies, then the women finally took it up. But the organization hadn't listened to the women. There's a lot of wisdom there, and we need to listen, because families and women and people do things for good reason. So we have to meet them where they are as we bring in new tools and educate them. And so it was just this very powerful connection from what President Carter had said to what I'm literally hearing from these women in this place in Mali. I was like, "Okay, that's incredible." Thank you so much. Thanks for your question, Reagan.

Oh, thanks for the question, Brian. Well, I mentioned several organizations at the back of the book that you can support. So whether that's giving them $10, $25, $100—Save the Children is one of them, there are several others in the back who really do a lot of work to lift up women and girls. So whether that's in the health space or in education, there are a lot of places doing incredible work. Another thing you can do in the United States is if you care about an issue like all the work that women do for caregiving, if you believe we should have a paid family medical leave policy, write the senators in your state and tell them you believe in it. We are the only industrialized nation that doesn't have paid family medical leave, and it's what's driving so many women out of the workforce right now. They're trying to care for their children, they're trying to care for the elderly, and so they're leaving the workforce. And without paid family medical leave, many of them are unlikely to go back. So you can both support with your dollars or you can support with your time and your energy by writing a congressperson an email.

Well, data analytics and HR—you cross those two things in any company, you're going to find that there are very few companies that don't have a problem in terms of how many women they have at all levels of management, and the same is true for minorities. So using the data and analytics and then in the HR role to make sure that the company puts it in their executives' goals, once you drive for transparency that everybody sees what the data is, and then you tie executives' goals to expectations at the end of review time for having a more inclusive and diverse environment, that's how you make progress. So your job is incredibly important during this time. So I think you're going to find your way through that. You're going to find lots of opportunities with when you're crossing those two majors.

Oh my god, I love that question. You know, it's going to take other men to really help. So women can call these issues out, they can band together and call them out, but it takes other men. When you hear a man say something that is disparaging of a Latina woman, or you hear the bias in his speaking, or you hear him speak over a woman or re-say her point, literally calling him out so he changes. And you have to figure out how to do that—do you do that in a public forum or do you do that in private? But it takes young men like yourself role modeling what we want in society for our Latina women, but then calling out others when they aren't doing the right thing. And sometimes if you have somebody who's in a very powerful position, it takes a group of men and women banding together and going to that person and saying, "No, the way you're thinking about that isn't right, or the way you're talking about women or treating them just isn't right." And I've seen communities do this and work on this, and when things are out in the open and the community all commits together, "Hey, we want to take down bias or we want to take down the harassment of women in our community," the community has to commit to it together, but then people have to take concrete actions against those who are committing these infractions. And once you do that, you take on some of the people who have the bigger infractions, you'll be surprised that it cleans up the rest of the community.

Yeah, so I, at least for me personally, don't think I ever would have come to this full realization if I hadn't traveled and been out in these places and if I hadn't listened. If I'd only gone in and espoused my point of view, I would still be working on the things I was working on before, and that would have been convenient. I mean, we're still trying to tackle childhood death and vaccinations as a foundation, but it's in the listening that you learn and you see where further changes are needed. And even if I had sat back and read the statistics, the statistics don't paint the picture of women's lives. They just don't. In fact, one of the longest-running household surveys that had been administered for over 30 years in the developing world—they would go in and ask a family, let's say it's a man and a woman, a couple, they'd say, "Well, who's the main breadwinner?" And as soon as it was often the man who answered, as soon as he answered, they went down a whole series of survey questions about his income. But they never asked her if she had income. And quite often women do, but they get it from the informal sector. And we didn't ask women how they spent the money differently than men, and they actually spent it very differently. So I know for me, I would not have seen that had I not been out there and listened. When I think of how we further issues in the United States, I think so often it means that we do have to listen to other communities, listen to people of color, listen to people who didn't grow up in the same zip code as us, listen to children. I mean, you're going into the education system, and you're going to learn a lot from the kids about what's actually going on in their home. And some of that is often very, very hard to hear. But when you hear it repeatedly as a pattern from different kids or different kids who are coming from a particular community maybe versus another one, you'll start to hear what's going on in that community, and it'll cause you, I think, to then decide you want to act. Because we know, for instance, when kids show up at the educational system, they're not all showing up from the same place. A child whose parent is homeless and shows up in kindergarten is very different than a child who shows up from a high-income zip code. Or a child who's heard gunshots during the night and is scared when they show up at school, versus another child who maybe hasn't had breakfast, versus another one who has had breakfast. Those are very different circumstances. And so I think this listening that we need to do—and you'll certainly do, I hope, in the education system—helps inform where we need to go if we're going to change society from a social justice standpoint.

That is a great question, Phoenix, and one that I wrestle with, and our foundation wrestles with all the time, because exactly as you said, there are so many issues, a plethora of issues out there. And so I have really tried to say, kind of, what are the couple of biggest barriers that hold women back? And again, if you look at the two biggest barriers for women: their abuse and harassment—whether it's abuse at home or harassment in the workforce. Just to give you an example, women leave their job at twice the rate if they've been harassed in their job; they're more likely to leave within two years than a woman who's not harassed. So abuse and harassment. And then this caregiving, this unpaid work that women do in their homes to care for the young, to care for the elderly, to get the lunch boxes together, to get the laundry done, a meal on the table—all that unpaid labor. So I look at those two issues. And then I look at what are the issues that move women along in terms of empowerment. Family planning is one of them, education is one of them. In a high-income country like ours, it's sometimes other things, like saying, "Okay, when women get to a certain point, what industries are they not far along enough in, and how would we change those?" So I try to take a very systematic approach. But I will tell you, it's not easy. And then how I decide where to travel has a lot to do with the foundation. They make recommendations to me on places I should go for new sets of learning and check up on some of the work we do or others do. And so we'll put a trip together with that in mind. And if I'm traveling to the continent of Africa, I'll try to go to several places while I'm on the continent. And then I also, I think, write about my book. I try to take time for quiet before I come home, because you take in so much that breaks your heart, but you've got to take it in before you come back home to our busy lives. And so I can walk back into the foundation and say where I think we still need to build on our work.

Thanks for the question, Phoenix.

21 or college age? Yeah, yeah. You know more than you think you do. And in college, I knew a lot about who I wanted to be in the world. And there are parts in life that, at least for me, pulled me away from my truest self at times. And yet it was always in there. And when you circle back to it, I think you're pretty fully baked even by then. You have a lot to learn in life and you have a big journey and a lot of wisdom ahead, but you're pretty fully baked, I think, in terms of your values when you get to college. And yes, you may go to one too many beer parties or something in college, or ten too many. But if you remember who you are and who you want to be in the world, and you don't forget that, you're going to be a pretty great adult. And the last thing I would say is just keep learning. Learning does not end at the end of college. And even if you got a degree in applied math or in civics or in English, you can go and learn biology or engineering or computer science if you want. Learning never ends, and you can learn from a lot of different people. And having some curiosity just makes it all a lot more fun.

Oh, well thank you. Thanks for hosting me. It was lots of fun, and thanks for the conversation, Aviva. And I really appreciated the student questions as well.