Melinda Gates on Fighting for Gender Equality

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Hi IdeaCast listeners, it's Alison Beard. I'm really excited for you to listen to this interview with Melinda Gates, which we taped live in New York. Since that happened, she's actually taken another big step in her push for gender equality, announcing that she's committing $1 billion over the next 10 years to expand women's power and influence in the United States through her company, Pivotal Ventures. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Welcome to the hbr ideacast from harvard business review. I'm alison be. You probably know today's guest. As one of the world's most prominent and generous philanthropists, she and her husband have created a foundation that has given away more than $50 billion 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 loved 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 Neue House in New York City sponsored by Target CW to explain to us why Melinda Gates is co chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company. She is also the author of the Moment of How Empowering Women Changes the World and the HBR article, gender Equality Is Within Our Reach. Melinda, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Allison.

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?

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 seems 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% 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, investments there, or we just wouldn't get very far in much of our work.

So what are some of the specific programs that the foundation has put in place, particularly to empower women in developing countries?

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, $2 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 are 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.

So you have traveled, as you said, all over the world. You've 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?

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 Senari. We stayed in their home. My oldest daughter was 15 at the time. We stayed in their home for several days, and Ana was absolutely in a loving relationship. She had the choice to go into this marriage. She wanted to be married to Sonari. And I would follow her around during the day as we would chop wood and carry water, which I was taking terrible at. Doing it 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 Sonari when I was alone with him, that at the birth of their first son, Robert, Senari came home, and Ana 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 Senari 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. I just. I can't make it work anymore. It doesn't work. And so he finally asked that key question, which is, well, what can I do? And because he loved her very much and wanted to stay married, she said, well, you could carry the water. Sonari 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. As some time went on, other men started walking with them, 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, well, why are we biking here every day? Why don't we get the community together and build several water pan 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 is doing unpaid labor. And some of it's lovely things we want to do, caring for our loved ones, our children. But some of it's just chores, doing the laundry, cooking, helping fill the lunchboxes, whatever. And that average for women around the world 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 Anand Senari had if we're gonna change that balance.

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.

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 the 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 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 sign. Solid hours. Admin had to put on his calendar for this driving, and he Said, look, it'll be great time in the car. Well, lo and behold, Bill started doing this. And then two weeks in 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. Right. And it was one of those funny things.

Right.

By having that conversation in our home, you know, 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.

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?

Right.

Can women have those same courageous conversations? Can communities activate in the same way?

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 US 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 in 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 as and men to decide that we want societal change for ourself 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.

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.

Right. So when we go in to do work as a foundation, a couple things that I think are really Important to know is the community 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 in 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've heard from people, they want to bring down their family size. Maybe contraceptives are a good idea. But when you go in to 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. So 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 do? You know? But when somebody offers me an idea, 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?

Yeah, I do imagine that you get pushback, perhaps on two fronts. One is, you know, how can a white, wealthy American donor come into these societies and try to change them? Should you even. And then, well, what about disadvantaged boys? Why are we only focusing on the girls? So tell me how you respond to those two potential areas of criticism.

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 worlds, and we work deeply. I think the other thing to know about the foundation is Bill and I have always known that all a philanthropy can do is, you know, our money may look large to people, but compared to the scale of the problems, hiv, aids, malaria, childhood diseases, you know, our money is actually a drop, is 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 up. 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 for from undergraduate universities than men. So 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 system 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.

So in the US 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?

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, you know, and he can say, hey, I don't want to be like those 10. But hey, those six, those are kind of the six. I'd like to role model one of those six. In any of those industries, a young woman looks up, and there aren't that many female leadership styles up at the top. There 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 conscious. A lot of discrimination, and honestly, a lot of harassment in the workforce. And we know that a woman at an 80% 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, you know, we have this dual burden where women are expected to be caregivers and work and most relationships. Now the man and the woman 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 and who's taking care of the young and the elderly, the women. So they have to step back from their career. 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 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.

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've mentioned?

Sure. I would say, well, first of all, make sure you have a robust leave policy for men and women. Less than 16% 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 a CEO, not just your HR manager, but that 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. 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 family friend or, you know, and we help them get that first internship or just get their foot in the door for an interview. I am saying more and more to people, okay, pick somebody this year and next year and the year after that for those internships, or when 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 we. 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.

You haven't mentioned quotas. Do you believe in rules like that?

I'm still looking at quotas, to be honest. I think sometimes there's a rule for them for a time. So 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 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 you know, 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 capital space. You know, women led businesses get less than 4% of VC funding, less than 4%, and a woman of color gets less than 1%. And yet I know so many women that have incredible ideas for markets, for, you know, for technology to create markets and create new products. And yet if we're not funding them. So I've 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.

So I do want to get a little bit more personal with you, if that's okay. You were a high powered 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?

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 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? 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'd worked on teams in my MBA school. But I almost left because I felt like I wasn't myself. I go to the grocery store and I was just rude to people. And I thought, that's not me. And so I thought, well, okay, I have this other job offer kind of sitting out there. I'll just try being myself. I'll probably fail at Microsoft. It won't matter, I'll just leave, right? And so I tried being myself. And 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. Creates permission for other people to be themselves. And I do know, again, the research shows 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 that the culture is a more supportive culture versus, you know, okay, you're going to debate your point to the nth degree.

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?

What would make you say my husband's opinionated? I'm just kidding. Read the book. I read the book. Yes. He has strong opinions. Well, I, you know, this is interesting. This is a place that I faced some bias, too, when I came 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 answer. And so much so that it was so obvious. I mean, everywhere in the world, anywhere you went, Europe, the U.S. you know, 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 see speak on topics some that I actually have a lot more knowledge and 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 as a 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, you know, 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 doubt 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 help me overcome that doubt. And then I had to look at also, which was not a very pretty picture, where does this perfectionism come from? And really work on that so that I could drop it and so that 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 a statistic in your back pocket that you forgot that particular day. But guess what? That's okay. I'm doing the best I can.

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.

Well, we're a particular kind of an organization. We start with the science and this belief both of us have in 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 malarial bed net, you're not going to change anything with all your great science. And 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, you know, 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, particularly 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 and 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. 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 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 chip so they're all truly on board, 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 came up.

To me and said, I hope he's not gonna listen.

I hope he does, actually. He's a good friend. Okay. But he's 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, you know, 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 daughters 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 is 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 US and that's when I knew we had the whole organization.

Terrific. Melinda, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

That's Melinda Gates, co chair of the 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. This episode was produced by Mary Dew. We get production help from Rob Eckart. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. We also want to thank our sponsor, Target, CW and Neue Haus for hosting this event. And so many thanks to this fabulous audience.

Thanks, everybody. It was fun.

Thanks for listening to the HBR Ideacast. I'm Alison Beard.