MELINDA GATES:

‘We always knew we would give away our fortune’ She’s a computer nerd turned stay-at-home mum; a devout Catholic who took the contraceptive pill to Africa. In a deeply honest interview, Melinda Gates talks to Juliet Rieden about her need to give back, and

the secret that haunted her

Melinda French had been working at Microsoft for just four months when her boss asked her out on a date. This was the whip-smart Bill Gates, CEO of the company, and his snappy chat-up line after they had struck up a conversation in the office car park, was “would you go out with me two weeks from Friday night?”.

Melinda is still laughing as she recalls that moment in 1987. “I was a young girl, I didn’t know what my calendar was going to be two weeks from Friday night. I did tease him and said, ‘that’s not really quite spontaneous enough for me’. So, he asked me for my phone number and I gave it to him … an hour later he called me at my apartment, and said, ‘Well, how about tonight?’”

That was more like it.

The date ended up being a late-night drink, since Bill had two other appointments on his schedule that evening – he wasn’t faking it, he really was a busy man – but it sparked a union that has moved mountains.

Today Bill and Melinda Gates are in the top 10 most powerful people in the world, not just because of the fortune they made from Microsoft, but because of the billions they choose to give

away in a bid to fix the world’s biggest issue – poverty. It’s a towering aspiration and as I later discover, the need to give back was a major part of what brought these two computer nerds together.

Dating the boss

Melinda was raised in Dallas, Texas, the second of four children born to Apollo program aerospace engineer Raymond French and homemaker Elaine. She says she was lucky to have great role models in the progressive nuns who introduced a computer into her school early on, giving her a jump-start into a world that was to become her passion.

“I definitely hoped and dreamed of going to college, for sure, and I knew that I wanted to study computer science and to be both a businesswoman and a mom,” says Melinda. When she won a place at Duke University, Melinda says she “had so much confidence in tech” it didn’t bother her that she was one of very few girls in the field. “I totally had my voice.”

After graduation she joined software up-andcomers Microsoft, where she was often a lone female voice in a sea of men, and while outside the company she regularly fought the heavy hand of sexism, inside she thrived. “Microsoft has a certain

culture that if you knew what you were talking about you’d have the floor,” she says.

Dating the boss was “interesting”, says Melinda. “We certainly didn’t try to hide it. In a small company you’re not going to keep something like that secret.” But as she rose to manager level, Melinda made it clear to her teams that despite her relationship with the CEO, she always put them first and had their backs. “They needed to know I wasn’t leaking information to the boss,” she says.

As we talk, I quickly realise concepts of fairness, integrity and equality are vitally important to Melinda, deeply embedded in her conscience. Bill famously dropped out of Harvard University after two years to start up Microsoft and was a millionaire by the age of 26. Individually and together these two bright sparks are incredibly driven, but it’s what they have chosen to do with the rewards for their brilliance and hard graft that picks them out from your average billionaires.

Family values

To start with, Melinda and Bill’s goals were very traditional – marriage then babies, definitely in that order. “I don’t remember a moment that I knew I wanted to marry Bill but in the first two years I certainly knew I loved him. I remember the time when we both told one another that,” says Melinda. “Then we did have a time when we were both dreaming about what would it be like to be married and our dreams about having children. Even if we married somebody else, how many kids did we want to have.

“We both wanted to have a family. We absolutely did,” Melinda stresses earnestly. “I knew I loved him but there was no way I would have married him if he didn’t want to have kids. I don’t believe you just fall in love with one person in life. You can meet other people if you’re lucky enough that are good matches.”

There’s a science to Melinda’s pragmatism that has served her well. It’s not that she’s unromantic, but she is unsentimental and impressively focused. While the rest of us flail through life, Melinda has always seemingly had a plan. “Luckily we both wanted to have kids. And we were both lucky. We both came from families with really good values.”

This was the second part of the puzzle for Melinda and this, I think, is where the heart comes in for this couple. Their meeting of minds is not about a fiery physicality – although that may well be there too – it goes much deeper, it’s about how together they can do the right thing. They share an at times exhausting optimism and, says Melinda, “equal values; we both care about people”.

I don’t imagine, back then, they were thinking of saving the world but the seeds were certainly sown. How this love match developed into a foundation to empower women and challenge poverty is the subject of Melinda’s powerful new book – part memoir, part call for action – The Moment of Lift. Melinda’s “moments of lift” – a cute reference to being with her father when they watched his rockets launch into the stratosphere – are those thrilling times when everything you have been working towards comes together and moves into action, and it is those moments she most savours.

Light and dark

Melinda was raised in the bosom of Catholicism, and is living proof that religion and science truly can go hand in hand. “It was the centre of our lives. My siblings and I went to Catholic school and when I was in elementary school we went to church every weekday for a while. We went to mass together as a family, every Sunday, and then we’d come home and have a big brunch,” she remembers.

“I would say my passion for faith and action, my belief in social justice and looking out for everybody, the roots of that completely come from the lessons of the Catholic Church, and particularly I think I was inspired by a set of nuns at my school. They really talked to us about questioning our faith, understanding where it came from, and then teaching us with belief that you go out and volunteer in the community, and if you change one life that can have a ripple effect.”

In the book Melinda, 54, talks for the first time in public about a dark time in her life, before she met Bill,

when she was trapped in an abusive relationship. She was young and her boyfriend was controlling with a “sick power” over her. It’s hard to imagine Melinda in such a situation, which is exactly why she plucked up the courage to write about it.

“I lost my voice for a very, very long time. I would say it’s only been in the last 10 years that I have my voice fully back,” she tells me. “That’s why I advocate so strongly on behalf of women, that’s why I’m so against any verbal abuse or workplace harassment and I speak out much more strongly than I did. You know that, in the US, 80 per cent of women leave their jobs within two years if they’ve been harassed at work. They lose their voice and then they’re put more and more aside.

“It was very hard for me to write about, but I wrote about it because I wanted people to understand, I wanted women to understand that

I’ve been through it as well. I know what that journey is and I know how horrible it is.”

Action stations

It was on a trip to Zanzibar in East Africa a year before they married when Bill and Melinda had their lightbulb moment, and it’s a moment that regularly plays on Melinda’s mind. “We hadn’t established the [Bill

& Melinda Gates] Foundation at that point and we didn’t have any idea how to invest money to improve people’s lives,” writes Melinda in her book.

“It was the fall of 1993 and we were hosting a trip with several other couples to Africa. We went on safari and we loved the animals but it was the people that touched us,” she tells me. “I remember driving outside one of the towns and seeing a mother who was carrying a baby in her belly, another baby on her back and a pile of sticks on her head. She had clearly been walking a long distance with no shoes, while the men I saw were wearing flip-flops and smoking cigarettes with no sticks on their heads or kids at their sides … We just kept thinking, ‘my God, should we do something here?’”

Melinda says that they “already knew that we were going to give away part of Microsoft’s resources but it was on that trip that we became committed. We didn’t think we’d start the Foundation right away – we thought that would be later – but we got so engaged during this trip that we started the Foundation right away.”

Back home, Melinda read the World Development Report. “Children in poor countries were dying from conditions that no kids died from in the United States.” It made no sense and set both Melinda and Bill on the only course they understood … action.

“By this time, we’d travelled to Kenya and Tanzania and Zanzibar. There was no way Bill could have started Microsoft in Kenya or Tanzania; there was no way I could have been a girl and been educated in those countries back then. So we had benefited by being lucky enough to be born in the United States. We both grew up in very middle-class families; we’d done quite well in terms of our work ethic and going to college. And we don’t really believe in hereditary wealth and so the right thing to do was to use [our fortune]. We felt like these vast resources [the money from Microsoft] came because of luck of birth and it really should go back to society.”

When Melinda found out she was pregnant, she quit work to be a stay-at-home mum. And while this may seem at odds with the empowered woman who was standing tall in her man’s world, it was completely on song as far as Melinda was concerned. In the book she is quick to defend mothers who choose to work but for her the path was clear.

“You have to remember Bill was the CEO of Microsoft,” she explains. “I knew the speed at which that company was moving and I saw what it took for him to do that job every day. It was not an 8 to 5 or 9 to 5 job. Not even close. So I felt if we wanted to have kids and we wanted to be

“If you change one life that can have a ripple effect.”

deeply involved, we couldn’t have two people going back hard-charging in the industry; I wouldn’t be doing justice to having children, the way I wanted to raise my children.”

Nevertheless, Bill was surprised. “He worried about me when I told him that I wasn’t going to work anymore because he knew how much I enjoyed it,” she says. “But I always knew I would go back to do something and I obviously was incredibly lucky Bill eventually started the Foundation and I could do that.”

Changing lives

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and is dedicated to improving the quality of life of people around the world. At the beginning, Melinda stayed in the background, partly she says so their three children – Phoebe, Jennifer and Rory – could have privacy and “as normal an upbringing as we could give them” and partly so she could be the mum she wanted to be.

“But then as the kids got older I started thinking, here I was having a daughter going into middle school just when girls can lose their confidence, and what I was telling my girls about having a strong voice in the world I wasn’t actually role modelling,” she says. “I thought,

I need to do this now.”

One of the key issues for Melinda was empowering women and especially those women and young girls in developing countries for whom access to contraception and family planning could transform their lives. She had personally benefited from contraception and she could see how it could save and change lives for so many families around the world. But taking the Pill to Africa was flying in the face of the teachings of her religion.

“I certainly have had to wrestle with my Catholic faith,” admits Melinda. “When you go to church every day of the week when you’re a kid, those roots are very deep, but even as a little girl I remember sitting in church and things would be said from the pulpit when I would think, that can’t quite be true, it just can’t. There’s a Bible quote they used to say quite often in church about ‘hear the cries of the poor’. I can tell you, I heard them. When this contraceptive issue came up, I just kept hearing them. All over in different countries in Africa, the women were crying out – literally when you hear the pain in their voice.

“It would have been much more convenient, to be honest, for me to turn away from this issue and I did try to turn away from it for a while but I just couldn’t. My social justice roots say, ‘I know this is the right thing’.

If I get judged by somebody because of what I’m doing, that’s totally fine, I know what I believe and I feel confident that this saves lives and I believe, if you believe in love, it’s important to save lives.”

In her book, Melinda talks about the moment when a desperate, poverty-stricken young mother in Africa begs her to take her newborn and two-year-old to a better life. It was a truly “devastating” moment when Melinda fully realised how crucial it is to empower women through contraception. “No mother in the world wants to give away her children. This mother didn’t want to give her children away, but she just couldn’t feed them. She knew she couldn’t feed them. She knew her hopes and dreams she had for them, she couldn’t fulfil. It was heartbreaking.”

When you hear stories like these, the idea of giving away billions is no longer baffling. Sharing the world’s wealth is quite simply the right thing

to do.