In her new book, Melinda Gates hopes to empower women
Billionaire activist’s new book discusses stories and strategies for empowering women
Melinda Gates is glad more women than ever ran for and were elected in the U.S. midterm elections last fall.
But Gates is a computer scientist and economist. So she realizes that, under the bright lights of basic math, that progress doesn’t seem all that progressive after all, as those 117 women equal only about 20 per cent of the total number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
"What I know is we need more women in all positions of power — and absolutely in politics,” said Gates during a recent interview with Postmedia at a downtown Vancouver hotel.
“At the current pace we’re on in the United States, we’re 60 years until we meet gender equality in our own country, Sixty years? To me that’s why equality just can’t wait. We have to all push this issue forward, men and women."
Gates, who along with her husband Microsoft founder Bill Gates and super-investor Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, is a trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), was in town taking part in the recent Women Deliver conference where she took some time to talk about her new book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World.
The book is a smart, interesting and accessible look at what Gates, who lives in Medina, Wash., has seen and learned during her two decades of work in global health.
The thesis is simple: if we lift up girls and women, everyone benefits.
For Gates, the place to start is reproductive rights. In the book you hear the stories of many women who are facing the common challenge of getting contraceptives. They tell Gates, in no uncertain terms, that another baby will mean sliding further into poverty and even death.
"In a certain way, it is the issue that is staring us all in the face and I think we forget,” said Gates, who joined Microsoft as a project manager in 1987.
“We have short histories in some of our high-income countries so, again, take the United States — which I know better obviously than Canada — what allowed women to go into the workforce in droves (was) the advent of the pill. Women could then time and space the birth of their children. So what I know about contraceptives is it is really the greatest anti-poverty tool we have, and yet over 200 million women are asking us for it and we’re not delivering it as a world.”
While the foundation is working hard to help women around the globe take control of their own bodies, there is a war against women raging in Gates’ own backyard as abortion bans are being passed by American state lawmakers. Bans that United Nations’ Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore categorized as “gender-based violence against women.”
"I think anytime you roll back women’s health issues it is important to me,” said Gates, who is a practicing Catholic who has decided to simply not agree with the church’s ban on contraceptives.
Gates, who can unsurprisingly recall stats like a computer, is engaging and engaged. She laughs easily and is visibly moved by the experiences she has had — and she is never far from her message.
The Gateses, who married in 1994, are worth around $134 billion, a figure that changes by the second.
In Gates’ world timing has and does play a big role. Fresh out of college she decided it was a good time to choose a young company (insert Microsoft here) over a major player when she joined the job force. She timed the birth of her children to be three years apart. And, most recently, she took society’s temperature and decided the appetite for a book about empowering women at this time could not be bigger.
“You start to see this movement building. I thought, we have this window of time and we’ve had other windows of time in history that have opened, but then they close,” said Gates referring to #metoo and #timesup.
The timing has paid off, as the book is a New York Times bestseller and, if anecdotal evidence can be considered, the book is paying off in terms of societal behaviour.
While Gates has the heft of the US$66-billion foundation — the largest private one in the world — behind her what, besides supporting more female politicians, can regular folks do to help make life better for women and once and for all secure gender equity.
Gates says the first step is to ask do you have equality at home, at work and in your community?
“Sometimes that means starting a difficult conversation in your home. That’s why I put a couple of my conversations in there,” said Gates. “Who is doing the dishes? Who’s putting out the garbage? All of that stuff.”
And, for the record, everyone in the Gates family does the dishes after dinner.