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Melinda Gates on Fighting for Gender Equality
Melinda Gates, cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Pivotal Ventures, is committing $1 billion over the next ten years to advance gender equality. She...
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Melinda Gates, cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Pivotal Ventures, is committing $1 billion over the next ten years to advance gender equality. She says evidence shows it’s the best way to drive economic development in nations and performance in companies. She shares her own stories as a female executive at Microsoft, a working mother, and a nonprofit leader learning from women around the world. Gates is the author of The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World and the HBR article “Gender Equality Is Within Our Reach.”
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
You probably know today’s guest as one of the world’s most prominent and generous philanthropist. She and her husband have created a foundation that has given away more than $50 billion [APPLAUSE] to health, education and economic development programs around the globe. But before all of that Melinda Gates then Melinda French was a young lady with a lot of ambition. She loves school. She was fascinated by computers. She got degrees in economics and computer science and then an MBA. She took a job at a little startup called Microsoft and she went on to manage some of its most important projects and people. After stepping back for a bit to raise her kids, she stepped up into an even bigger role, driving the agenda for her family’s huge charitable organization. And in recent years she’s been asking an important question. What would societies look like if smart and driven girls and women, people just like her, except born in very different circumstances were given better opportunities to study, to work, and succeed? She thinks it would make an enormous difference and she is here today at a live event in NueuHouse in New York City, sponsored by TargetCW, to explain to us why. Melinda Gates is cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company. She is also the author of the book Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World and the HBR article “Gender Equality is Within Our Reach.” Melinda, thank you so much for joining us.
MELINDA GATES: Thanks for having me, Alison. [APPLAUSE]
BEARD: So, let’s just get to the headline question here. Why have you made gender equity such a big priority for the Foundation and your company?
GATES: So, you know I’ve been lucky enough to travel on behalf of the Foundation now for almost 20 years, to all corners of the globe. And as we were making these investments, for instance, in people’s health, or in their livelihoods, I started to realize that we just were not having the effect we had hoped to have because we were missing honestly, the big idea. And the big idea was, and it was staring us in the face, it seemed so obvious to me now, is we had to look at all of our programming through the eyes of a woman because Bill and I believe in, totally believe in innovation and change for the world. But if we would come out with new innovation and we thought that as we got it out in the developing world, that it got out equally, that was just a fundamental flaw. It is not true. That if we have a new seed, for instance, that’s drought resistant in this time of climate change and we put it out through the agri-dealers all over Africa, we thought, well we know that 50 percent of the farmers are women, but if we thought that seed got into the hands of the women equally as the hands of men, that was just a completely false assumption. And as I started to look at those issues more systematically I realized that we had to look at the gender piece and we had to start making investments there or we just wouldn’t get very far in much of our work.
BEARD: So, what are some of the specific programs that the foundation has put in place, particularly to empower women in developing countries?
GATES: Sure. So, we are still, I’m going to be frank here. We’re still taking this problem apart because it is deep and it is wide. And it starts with barriers that women are up against, so in different countries, it can be, for instance, child marriage. If you’re married early, you’re immediately locked into a cycle of poverty. So, some of the specific things that we do is we invest early and often in family planning, contraceptives. I think one of the things we almost take for granted in the United States is that it was the advent of the pill that allowed women to go into the workforce in droves. To be able to space and time the births of our children, to stay in college and then to get a job. And women all over the world, 220 million women are asking us for the basic tools we have right now, contraceptives. So, we started there. We’re doing a whole host of things I could describe, but let me say at the other end, the piece that we’re also using on economic opportunity is the mobile phone. And I’m not talking about a smartphone. It’s nice if a woman has a smartphone in the developing world. Most don’t. But that basic plastic mobile phone. She can save a dollar a day, two dollars a day and so when the school fees come due for her children, or when there’s a health shock in the family, or the crop fails, she’s in charge of coming up with that money. And so she actually has savings of her own on the phone, and we know that money in the hands of anybody is power. And so, we’re starting to really look at that digital bank account and help women have access to them, to be able to save money every single day.
BEARD: So, you have traveled as you said, all over the world. You spent so much time listening to people on the ground, sometimes even living with them. Are there particular stories that stick with you that highlight how women were struggling and how things have improved for them, as a result of these programs?
GATES: Sure. So, I’ve met so many people over the years who’ve opened their homes to me, who’ve let me walk their journey. One of them in particular that I write about is a woman named Anna in the book. She’s Tanzanian. She’s married to a man named Sanare. We stayed in their home. My oldest daughter was 15 at the time. We stayed in their home for several days. And Anna was absolutely in a loving relationship. She had the choice to go into this marriage. She wanted to be married to Sanare. And I would follow her around during the day as we would chop wood, and carry water, which I was terrible at doing. It’s really hard. The women in the village laughed at me because I just couldn’t even begin to carry half of what they carried on their heads. But as we shared she told me a story that I later confirmed with Sanare when I was alone with him, that at the birth of their first son Robert, Sanare came home and Anna had packed her bags and was sitting on the front porch and she had Robert in her arms, the baby, and she said I’m leaving you. And Sanare just couldn’t believe it. And he said why? And she said because the land you have here, your father’s land is very arid. I can’t nurse our son and do all my chores around the farm, and carry the water. Sanare started doing it himself. The men in the village all were laughing at him because Maasai men, he’s Maasai, do not carry water in the developing world. And as some time went on other men started walking with him and they started to realize how many hours it took and how hard it was. And so the men eventually decided they would get their bicycles and do it, and eventually they were like why are we biking here every day? Why don’t we get the community together and build several water pans around our villages? Which is what they ultimately did. And so that simple question, her standing up and saying what she needed, I started to learn about this task of unpaid labor, which women do all over the world in a disproportionate amount to men. And even in the U.S., well, we spend 90 minutes more every single day than our spouses, doing unpaid labor. And some of its lovely things we want to do, caring for our loved ones, our children, but some of its just chores. Doing the laundry, cooking, helping fill the lunch boxes, whatever. And that averaged for women around the world, it averages out to seven years of their life that they don’t get to do other things they might want to do. And I think we need to change that and we need to have courageous conversations in our own home, like Anna and Sanare had, if we’re going to change that balance.
BEARD: You tell a great story in your book about your husband taking on some of that work in your own home and it also having an impact in your community. So, I’d love for you to share that.
GATES: Sure. With our first daughter, she was about to start preschool. Bill and I agreed the school that we wanted her in was not close to our house. It was a good 25 minutes away from the house, across a bridge. And I could just see all the years ahead of driving back and forth to this school in a minivan and I knew we wanted to have more children. We already had a second son and we would hope to have a third. And I finally said to Bill, oh my gosh, I can see my life ahead driving across this freeway and why don’t we just put her in the neighborhood school for a few years and then we’ll switch her at a certain age over to this other school. And he said no, he felt strongly that she start at preschool. And I just said, I just can’t do it. The years ahead of driving. And he asked that question. What can I do? And before I even could answer, he actually offered a solution which shocked me. I didn’t even think he was serious at first, to be frank. He was the CEO of Microsoft at the time and he said, well I’ll drive two days a week. I will drive her to school, which meant driving across this bridge, coming back past our house to Microsoft. So, it was a good solid hour his admin had to put on his calendar for this driving. And he said look, it will be great time in the car. Well lo and behold, Bill started doing this, and then two weeks in the school year, some of these other women in the classroom, sort of sidled up to me and said, hey have you noticed any changes in the classroom? And I said yeah. It seems like there’s a lot of dads driving and she said yeah. Well, we went home and said to our husbands, by gosh, if Bill Gates can drive his daughter, so can you. [LAUGHTER] And it was one of those funny things. [APPLAUSE] By having that conversation in our home, and making a change for us, we ended up inadvertently role modeling something in the school which just was just the right thing. And to be honest, Bill ended up driving all three kids over the years, and it was this precious time that they got with their dad in the car that they knew they were important to him. If he was going to take an hour in the morning to do that, right, to get them to school.
BEARD: Yeah. So, though what do you do to get that kind of change in societies, in households where the answer wouldn’t be what could I do to help? Can women have those same courageous conversations? Can communities activate in the same way?
GATES: It depends. So, it really depends by area, even inside of countries, to be frank. And it’s not that different. Just like in the U.S. you have places where it’s easier to do that and places where people are more held back in those conversations. But the thing that does work is when you get women to band together, so I’ve seen it in places in northern India where you would think women have very little power. If they band together and form a self-help group, women en masse can go and demand of the government, we deserve a health clinic here. I’ve heard of women standing up to the police and saying, you know what? No more are you not going to go and charge somebody with rape when we come forward in our community, and we tell you what’s going on. So, when we band together as women, or when we band together even more powerfully as women and men, to decide that we want societal change for ourselves and for our daughters and sons who come behind us, and our granddaughters and our grandsons. When we stand together, that is when you create change.
BEARD: So, you found that there are communities you’ve gone into as a foundation to set up programs that initially there’s been resistance, particularly from the men that you’ve turned it around.
GATES: Right. So, when we go into do work as a foundation, a couple of things are really important to know is the community has to be, has to want you to come in and work. We can’t go in with new ideas and just say, you should do this. They have to have some receptivity to it, and then we have to go in and very culturally appropriate ways with people who are already working and living in that community for many, many years. And so, we might have an idea of hey, we heard from people. They want to bring down their family size, maybe contraceptives are a good idea. But when you go into meet with the village they may say, hey the first thing we care about is having clean water in our village. Like, don’t talk to me about contraceptives. I want clean water. You have to work where they are first, then you start to introduce new ideas and then you find more receptivity there. So, I often think about it, if somebody was coming in my home, would I want them to kind of point a finger and say you should do this, you should do that? Who are they to, you know? But when somebody offers me an idea as somebody I trust, I’m more likely to listen to it and say oh, well why does he or she think that’s a good idea for their family and it might be a good idea for my family.
BEARD: Yeah. I do imagine that you get pushback perhaps on two fronts. One is how can a White, wealthy American donor come into these societies and try to change them? Should you even? And then, well what about disadvantage boys? Why are we only focusing on the girls? So, tell me how you respond to those two potential areas of criticism?
GATES: I learned something really early on, right as we were starting the foundation. Former President Jimmy Carter was at the foundation. He’d already been working in global health for years. And I said to him, President Carter, what should we know starting out that you learned that maybe we wouldn’t have to relearn? And he said Melinda, any piece of work that you all try to do as a foundation, it has to be owned on the ground by the people in those communities. If you want lasting and sustained change, he said, you might come in and because you have funding, they might be interested for a year or two, but as soon as you leave they’re going to go back to doing what they care about. So, we have always come in with the model of trying to build where people are and what they’re interested in. So, you have to talk about what are their dreams? So, that’s how we do the work in the developing world. And we work deeply. I think the other thing to know about the Foundation is Bill and I have always known that all of philanthropy can do is, our money may look large to people, but compared to the scale of the problems, HIV/Aids, malaria, childhood diseases. Our money is actually a drop in the bucket. It’s actually tiny. It’s all about can we take experiments and start to scale them up? Test that they work, measure them, start to scale them up and then get the government to scale it up. I mean if you want to have, really have change, it’s government scale-ups. So, we always have that in mind. And then certainly you get backlash. So, even in the United States, I’m starting to hear much more, well women are rising. Women are graduating at a higher rate from undergraduate universities than men. We’re hearing that. It is true. This is about everybody rising. So, we want men and young boys to keep rising, but it doesn’t mean just because we’re making progress on behalf of women that somebody else is being pushed down. And women are making it a certain distance in fields, but boy there’s a lot of places like computer science where the number of women graduating has gone down massively, since the time I was in college. And then you add on the statistics of people of color, women, Latino women and the statistics are very low in a number of fields. So, this is about moving all of society forward.
BEARD: Yeah. So, in the U.S. your piece in HBR notes that we still aren’t doing a very good job for women, particularly in the workplace. So, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see here for us?
GATES: I don’t see women rising all the way to the top. When young girls, well-educated girls come out of college, they look up. If a young boy comes out of college, he looks up and he can see three dozen different archetypes of male leaders. And he can say hey, I don’t want to be like those 10, but hey, those six, those are kind of the, I’d like to role model one of those six in any of those industries. A young woman looks up and there aren’t many female leadership styles up at the top. There’s certainly aren’t three dozen in every industry. And if she looks up in finance, hmm, you don’t see that many women. You look up in the tech industry. How many women do you see at the top of a tech company? How many women are starting tech businesses? So, women come out of college and then all of a sudden we start hitting these barriers. And so we need to reduce those barriers. Some of the barriers are bias. A lot of bias. A lot of it unconscious, but some of it is conscious. A lot of discrimination and honestly, a lot of harassment in the workforce. And we know that a woman at an 80 percent rate will leave her job within two years if she’s harassed in the workforce. And there’s a lot of harassment. So, we have to actually look at those barriers and bring them down. We have to do I think some policy things like paid family medical leave. We’re the only, the only industrialized nation that does not have paid family medical leave. And so, we have this dual burden where women are expected to be caregivers and work. And most relationships now, the man and the women are working, and yet we’re working, the workforce is sort of designed for our grandfathers when we used to assume one person went to work, and one person stayed home and cared for the kids. And now we have this aging population. Who’s taking care of the young and the elderly? The women. So, they have to step back from their careers. They can’t make it all work. And yet if we had a paid family medical leave policy where men and women like in the Nordic countries were taking and using it, it starts to change the norm in society. So, I think we have, we certainly have some work to do to bring down those barriers and then we have some investments to make to help get women to the top.
BEARD: Yeah. So, what about at the organizational level? What should the business leaders in this audience listening, what should they do in their companies? Assuming that policy isn’t going to be changed immediately to make things better for women. Not just on that issue, but all of the ones you mentioned?
GATES: Sure. I would say, well, first of all, make sure you have a robust leave policy for men and women. Less than 16 percent of U.S. workers have access. So, we talk about it, but not that many people have it. So, make sure you have a really robust plan and that you understand it if you’re the CEO, not just your HR manager, but you understand it and it reflects your values and what you would want for your daughters and your daughter’s daughters. And if that policy doesn’t reflect that, change it. We can make decisions. Just change it. So, there’s that. There’s how do you create pathways for women into industries? So, women are underrepresented for instance in media. Media shapes society and tells our stories at the top of media. Women are underrepresented in other key industries like finance. That we’re underrepresented in politics quite honestly. That’s what sets our policies. We’re underrepresented in tech. And tech is a place that is literally shaping our world as we know it. So, how do we make sure if you’re in one of those industries, or you have influence in any of those industries, how do you create pathways in for women? How do you make sure that very first internship goes to a woman or a person of color? We all have networks. All of us. And you know you’ll have a young man come to you, or maybe a young woman that’s a friend of a friend’s friend, or you know, and we help them get that first internship, or just get their foot in the door for an interview. I’m saying more and more to people, OK, pick somebody this year and next year and the year after that for those internships, or will you help someone get their foot in the door? Make sure it isn’t somebody who looks like you. Different gender than you; doesn’t look like you. Go to your company and say we’re going to open more internships at different levels. So, how do we create pathways in? Because when women start building their resume, just like a man, it makes a huge difference in terms of the job they get when they come out of college. If it’s a low-income woman, she has to have income. She can’t go take an unpaid internship and she may not have as much time. But guess what? We’re starting to see that some of these programs, there’s one here in New York called the Whitney Program where women have, young women have three weeks at the holiday time. And so, they’ll go take a paid internship there and it gets their first foot in the door. Maybe in a pharmaceutical company, or in a tech company. That is a great way in. Sponsor people for jobs. Don’t just mentor, but sponsor women and people of color for jobs.
BEARD: You haven’t mentioned quotas. Do you believe in rules like that?
GATES: I’m still looking at quotas, to be honest. I think sometimes there’s a role for them, for a time. So, I, for me the jury’s still out on that. I’m looking at the research on it across the world. I think there’s some people who are trying things here. If we don’t start to really move the needle on these industries, or even in public policy then I think you have to start to look at temporary quotas, just to start to move, move women and people of color up. These industries are just too low. And the other thing I would say is even separate from companies, is if you have capital of any sort, people come to you I’m sure for Angel investing, for a small loan, or maybe it’s you want to be in the venture capitalist space. Women-led businesses get less than four percent of VC funding. Less than four percent. And a woman of color gets less than one percent. And yet, I know so many women that have incredible ideas for markets, for technology to create markets and create new products. And yet, if we’re not funding them, so I actually started to move capital into those areas because we have to let those business ideas come up and bubble up because they will help society.
BEARD: So, I do want to get a little more personal with you if that’s OK.
GATES: OK.
BEARD: You were a high power executive at Microsoft as I said in the intro. You’re now a very prominent female leader. How have your own experiences in the workplace influenced your thinking on all of these issues?
GATES: It’s interesting because you read the statistics about bias, or women not getting to certain places and then you go back to your own lived experiences, and the lived experiences I had at the time and with my peers, and even when I came into the philanthropy sector, and I certainly had moments in my career where, I talk about this a bit in the book, where at Microsoft, it was a very, it was a very brash culture. You had to defend, it was kind of the boys debating club. You had to defend your point tooth and nail in any meeting you went to. And quite frankly, I can do it. I know how to play the man’s game. But it’s exhausting. It is. It’s exhausting and sometimes you’re like what is the point? [LAUGHTER] I mean seriously. And so, I almost left Microsoft because of it. I loved what the company was doing. I liked the people I was around. I loved the products we were creating. But I just felt like at some point I didn’t like myself very much anymore. Like I had so taken on that style, that masculine style and it wasn’t really me. I had led teams before, even before I got to Microsoft, of programmers in college, and I worked on teams in my MBA school. But I almost left because I felt like I wasn’t myself. I’d go to the grocery store and I was just rude to people. [LAUGHTER] And I thought that’s not me. And so I thought well, OK, I have this other job offer kind of sitting out there. I’ll just try being myself. I’ll probably fail at Microsoft and it won’t matter. I’ll just leave, right. And so, I tried being myself and I, one, I enjoyed it a lot more. And two, I started being able to attract programmers from all over the company. And people would say to me, how did you get that amazing male programmer from that group across the company to come work in the consumer division? And I would just say, well maybe it’s the culture that we’re actually creating. So, I definitely have lived experiences where it’s not been easy to always be myself, but I’m learning that the more I step in and just be myself, it creates permission for other people to be themselves. And I do know, again the research shows that if we can show up at work as our full authentic selves, we’re just much happier. And so, I’ve been incredibly purposeful with the culture of the foundation. That it’s, you know, it’s certainly we expect results. We have lots of great scientific thinking. We have lots of intellectual discussion and debate. But the culture’s a more supportive culture versus OK, you’re going to debate your point to the nth degree.
BEARD: So, this is maybe even a little bit more personal. You work right alongside your husband. He is a brilliant, famous, I take it very opinionated guy. So, how have you found your own individual voice next to him?
GATES: What would make you say my husband’s opinionated? [LAUGHTER] I’m kidding. [LAUGHTER]
BEARD: Read the book. I read the book. [LAUGHTER]
GATES: Yes, he has strong opinions. And well, I, you know this is interesting. This is a place that I face some bias too. When I came into this foundation, into this philanthropy field, which is we would walk into a room, let’s say with a president or a prime minister or a health minister, and it was really interesting. I noticed right away. Whenever we would come into the room they would immediately turn to my husband as if he was going to speak and he had the answers. And so much so that it was so obvious, I mean everywhere in the world. Anywhere you went. Europe, the U.S., developing world countries that it became this joke between Bill and me because we so, once I called it out, he so noticed it too. And so, and he said yeah, why would people think that I am not married to somebody that’s smart? And I said yes. However, you need to make room for me and you need to make room for me sooner in the conversation. So, given that that’s the place that they go first is you, you need to create an opening and if he would forget, which he sometimes did, more than once at the beginning. I would just immediately start to like kind of speak and speak in and then people would realize, oh they really are doing this together. And I think now we’ve gotten to the point where people know I have my own point of view on many, many, many topics and that I speak on topics, some that I actually have a lot more knowledge and a different point of view than Bill does. And the good thing is Bill’s up for a good challenge and I’m up for a good challenge. I don’t shrink very easily. But I will also say that entering a new field, if you choose to switch jobs which I did, two things. One is we see this at the foundation when women have gone out, or men, but particularly women, when they’ve gone out on paid family medical leave, when they come back their confidence is just a little bit lower because you’ve been out of the game for six months. And so, we need to do a little bit more to support them. I was that way coming back from having children, re-entering the workforce. I had more doubts for sure. I had more this need for perfectionism. And so, I had to really look at those things in myself and figure out how to surround myself with people who helped me overcome that doubt. And then I had to look at also, which is not a pretty picture, where does this perfectionism come from and really work on that so that I could drop it, and so I could just be my full self. And sometimes that means making mistakes in front of audiences, or on a podcast, or on a video. Sometimes it means wishing you had statistics in your back pocket that you forget that particular day. But guess what? That’s OK. I’m doing the best I can.
BEARD: Right. One story that really impressed me in terms of your leadership in the organization, the foundation, was your push toward gender equity. Because you could have come in and just said, guys, this is what I believe now and we’re doing this, but you didn’t do that at all. So, I’d love for you to tell our audience about how you did approach it and why.
GATES: Well, we’re a particular kind of an organization. We start with the science and this belief, both of us have an innovation. And I had to help steer, originally we were much more honestly quite a research foundation. We were doing all this, we thought, amazing science in different disease areas. But I could see very quickly through my travels that you can have the best science in the world, but if a woman or a man won’t accept those polio drops in their child’s mouth, or the vaccine, or sleep under a malarial bed net, you’re not going to change anything with all your great science. So, I actually had to help turn the ship of the foundation from research and science to also delivery. And I learned from that experience that some people don’t change very easily. And so, sometimes you have to hire new people. You have to go around them. You have to teach people, particular scientists who like to sometimes be siloed, how to work on teams. I had a lot of team experience in business school and in coding in undergraduate. A lot of team experience at Microsoft. So, in changing that ship and helping the foundation realize that we’re both about science and delivery, when it came to gender I knew this wasn’t going to come naturally to our organization. And we’re also gearheads. I like to call us data geeks. We like to have data. But I had to go and look for the data to try and present it to the foundation and it turned out there was no data. There is very little data collected on women around the world. Well, guess why? Because the people making the decisions about data and what we collect, the economists, were a lot of men. So, I knew to change an organization’s mindset, it can’t just be me. I could just say it from the top, but if you really want to change everybody and steer the ship so they’re all truly onboard, you have to do it in a way to bring them along. And so, I published a piece externally in Science Magazine about what I had learned and knew and it was actually an external signal, but it was also an internal signal to show the foundation where we were going. Then I started to collect the data, present the data to the foundation and I knew I had the foundation when one of the most, I will say, what would you say? Stuck in his ways scientist [LAUGHTER] came up to me and said —
BEARD: I hope he’s not going to listen. [LAUGHTER]
GATES: I hope he does actually. He’s a good friend, OK? But he was definitely stuck in his ways. And he finally came up to me and he said you know Melinda, I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. You started talking about this gender stuff, four years ago. I kind of went along because I’m supposed to because you’re the Co-Chair, but you know, I’m still doing my science over here. And then he said, my daughter’s both graduated from college and he goes, now I get it. I completely get it. He goes, they’re not getting where they want in the workforce and my wife and I made sure we put the money aside. We educated them well in the United States, and one of them’s in the sciences and it’s really hard in the sciences for her. He said, I’m your biggest champion now. Not just for the developing world, but also for the U.S. And that’s when I knew we had the whole organization.
BEARD: Terrific. Melinda, thank you so much for joining us today.
GATES: Thanks for having me. [APPLAUSE]
BEARD: That’s Melinda Gates. Cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founder of Pivotal Ventures, and author of the Moment of Lift. To read her HBR article and others in the Big Idea Program, Women, Power and Influence, please go to HBR.org/genderequality. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get production help from Rob Eckhardt. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. We also want to thank our sponsor TargetCW, and NeueHouse for hosting this event. And so many thanks to this fabulous audience. [APPLAUSE] Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.