And to kick off Boss Week,
I have the privilege of chatting
with one of the most powerful philanthropists
in the entire world.
Not only is she an advocate for women,
but she's also a "New York Times" bestseller.
Please welcome the incredible Melinda Gates!
Thank you so much for being here.
- Yeah, so glad we could do this.
- There's so much stuff I wanna talk to you about,
but this is Boss Week,
so I wanna start from the beginning.
Before you were a public figure
and before it was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
you were traveling the world
and meeting women from all walks of life.
What was your biggest takeaway meeting all of those women?
- You know, in just sitting with women--
it would often be on a small mat,
you know, outside their home,
and we'd be having some tea together,
and you start to realize meeting all these women
how alike we are
versus how different we are.
And, you know, for them to have me in their homes
and to hear about their children
or their hopes and the dreams,
it just really touched me
how we want the same things for our families.
We want our kids to grow up healthy
and get an education and a great job,
and they've really just inspired me
over so many years from these many conversations I had.
It's been incredible.
- It's amazing you say that, because I feel like
the more you travel
to the furthest parts of the globe,
the more you realize we're all alike
and we all have these common threads.
Now, Melinda, this is the first time
we're meeting, correct?
Like, maybe our teams have emailed a little bit.
I'm going to just conclude
that we are friends here, if that's cool.
That's the conclusion I'm coming to.
We're friends, and I wanna have some real talk with you.
Because I read your annual letter,
and I loved it, by the way.
I read it, and you talk a lot about women needing to be
the center of the COVID response,
and a lot of why you say this is because of unpaid care.
Now, this is kind of parallel to what you're talking about
with family planning,
and the real talk question I wanna ask you is,
you know, you are obviously a very wealthy white woman,
and when you travel to places of the world
where there's not only a financial issue,
but a cultural issue that's a barrier,
how do you navigate that tricky space?
- Well, first of all, I often just go in
as a woman from the West or an American woman,
and I'm in a T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants.
Sometimes I'll have one of my children with me.
My 15-year-old daughter traveled with me at one point.
And I just go in and say to the women
that I wanna learn.
I wanna learn about their lives.
And I'm often working with a partner
who's been on the ground and part of those communities
for 20 or 30 years.
And it takes a while, just like--
we're instant friends, of course,
but you're not instant friends with these women.
But they do warm up,
particularly if you let the men
kinda wander away at some point.
Then the women will roll up their sleeves
and they'll literally get in this conspiratorial voice
and say, "You wanna really hear what's going on?
Now we can tell you."
- Oh, so that's common around the world.
Wives being like, "Let me tell you
the real gossip about my husband."
Right, and I can imagine that,
you know, culture is different everywhere you travel,
so it's not like what you will learn from Nigeria
will apply to what you learn from Uttar Pradesh.
Like, they have totally different cultures.
And so I wanna ask you, honestly,
just a little selfishly, me having an Indian background,
what have you found helps tackle
some of the cultural barriers
in India when it comes to women?
- Yes, you often have to look--
no matter what country you go into,
you have to look at the power structures
around a woman and what holds her back.
And so often, in India,
particularly in Northern India,
if you wanna teach women new practices
that they might wanna take up
like understanding to breastfeed their baby
early and immediately,
keep the baby warm,
you have to first influence the mother-in-law
because she's--often has say
or is in charge of her daughter-in-law.
So you bring them together,
these circles of older women and younger women,
and you educate the older women,
and then they'll say, "Oh, yes,
"my daughter-in-law should do that"
instead of doing the traditional thing
of maybe giving goat milk to the baby at the beginning.
- I don't know if you heard that,
but it's all the daughter-in-laws
watching this show at home being like, "Yes!
Oh, my God, my mother-in-law makes me do X, Y, Z."
[laughter]
I love talking to you, bestie.
Like, this is--I'm having such a good time right now.
But I wanna ask, you have such a strong voice
and you're such a boss woman,
but did it always start like that?
Like, you had to probably learn
how to have a voice through this process
of learning how to be in the public eye.
Or were you always just very outspoken?
- No, no, I've definitely had to learn,
and I would just say, you know,
look, I've went into many situations early on
where Bill and I would walk
into a president or prime minister's office
and, you know, the first person
they would talk to is Bill,
and then they would continue to talk to Bill.
And so I had to learn to speak up early and often,
and then it was like this--
you could almost see this light bulb go off.
Quite often, the prime minister
or president was a man, and then he'd be like,
"Oh, she knows what she's talking about.
She's deeply involved."
And I had to coach Bill some to say,
"Make space for me early on in these meetings, right?"
- Ooh, I like that.
- 'Cause they're gonna assume you're the boss.
But you're not. We are peers in this.
And we wanted to be peers, cochairs.
- And I love that you bring it up,
and you also speak a lot about this
in your book, "The Moment of Lift,"
which is incredible.
And I love that you said
that you had to coach Bill a little bit
to make space for you in these meetings
because it takes two, you know?
All of this progression takes two.
And so what is it kind of like to coexist
next to one of the most powerful men in the world?
- [laughs]
Well, I don't see him at home
as the most powerful man in the world.
- You tell him! You tell him!
- Well, at home, we do the dishes together
and as a family.
But yes, often at the office,
he was seen as the more powerful one,
so again, we would have conversations
before we go into a meeting
of, "Okay, make sure you give me space and time."
I did learn every now and then,
I'd have to, like, kick him under the table,
like, if he was over-speaking me.
Like, nobody likes to be, you know, over-spoken,
a man or a woman.
Now, he much more readily makes space for me,
which is great and as it should be.
- I love that.
And so you both talk a lot
about gender equity around the globe,
but how does that apply to in your household?
- Yeah, well, I had to look at that
because, you know--one story I tell in my book is,
when our first daughter, Jen, was born,
we both agreed about the school
we eventually wanted her to go to,
but it was not close to our house,
and I finally said to Bill--
we're making this decision about preschool,
that I could see all the years
of driving ahead in the minivan.
And I kept saying, "Why don't we wait
and put here there at third or fourth grade?"
And he felt very strongly she start at preschool.
And I was so frustrated,
and finally, he said, "Why are you frustrated?"
And I said, "I can see years ahead of driving."
And he said, "What if I drive several days a week?"
And this was a huge commitment for him.
And interestingly,
about three weeks into the school year,
the moms kind of sidled up to me, and they said,
"Hey, have you seen a change in the classroom?"
And I said--"Well," I said,
"I kinda noticed more dads coming in in the morning,"
and they said, "Yeah, we went home
"and said to our husbands, 'Hey, if Bill Gates can drive
his daughter to school, so can you.'"
- You tell 'em! - Yeah!
I mean, by having this conversation
in our own home, we inadvertently role-modeled,
and so more dads were driving to school.
- I need to tattoo this interview
on my forehead somehow
because I love it so much.