Melinda Gates on How Women Can Change the World

Melinda Gates has worked with her husband, Bill, to donate billions of dollars to struggling people in developing countries through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (its motto: “All lives have equal value”). In her new book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, she offers stories of the inspiring women she’s met around the world, and a call to action for both men and women to “crack the patterns of history.” We talked to Gates about her life and philanthropy.

What was your biggest misconception when you started your foundation?

That if we had a breakthrough — a new vaccine, a new contraceptive, a new seed — and we got it into the supply chain, it would reach men and women equally. That turned out to be a very false assumption. Even if a country’s government says it wants to deliver these tools, few actually make it into the hands of women.

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In your book, The Moment of Lift, you write about a heartrending encounter you had with a young woman in northern India. Was that an “Aha!” moment for you?

Meena was a woman I met at a health facility we’d helped fund. She’d recently given birth, and we had a warm conversation, mother-to-mother, about bonding with a new baby. But when I asked if she planned to have more children, she said, “The truth is, no. I don’t know how I’m going to feed this child. I don’t have any hope of educating him. The only hope I have for this child’s future is for you to take him home with you.” The conversation crushed me. I had to tell her, “I’m so sorry. I can’t.” I started digging and learned that more than 200 million women in developing countries wanted access to contraceptives but didn’t have it.

Your global campaign to give contraceptives to 120 million women by 2020 has made you unpopular in some places.

I’m a practicing Catholic, but I really had to follow my conscience on this one. I was seeing so much death in the developing world. I would go out and get 60 women in a village together and ask them to raise their hands if they knew of someone who had lost a child in childbirth. Every single hand would go up! The lack of contraceptives — and having children too soon and too often — was causing an immense amount of misery.

Hans Rosling, an expert on international health, once told you, “American billionaires giving away money will mess everything up.” How do you avoid that?

He advised me to always go to the margins of society. He taught me that I needed to go out and talk to women and understand — with data — where they were being held back on a societal level.

That’s not just a developing-world issue, is it?

Correct. I remember looking a few years back at how far women had actually come in the United States. I thought we were fully empowered. But less than 5 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs were women. And when I went through each industry systematically, I realized that we still had a long way to go.