Take time to learn about the lives of women around the world-and try to play a small part in their fight to create the future they deserve.
MELINDA GATESMen make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family’s well-being – as much as 10 times more.
More Melinda Gates Quotes
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If you ask, who has the chance to move into the city and get a good job out in the developing world? It’s a man. Who’s left to care for the kids back at home? The woman is.
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My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups – development, testing, marketing, user education.
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Our economies are built on the backs of all this unpaid labor that women do.
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My undergraduate work was in computer science and economics. It just happened to be at that time when 34 percent of computer-science majors were women. We didn’t realize it was at the peak at the time.
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We look in our own backyard and say, ‘How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?’
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Philanthropy is not about the money. It’s about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world.
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Now, as smartphones are coming up, there are all kinds of apps that will start to be developed that will help women.
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Deep human connection is … the purpose and the result of a meaningful life – and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.
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I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.
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Bill [Gates] and I believe philanthropy can only be effective if it starts things and proves whether they actually work or not. That’s the place that governments often don’t want to, or can’t, work.
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I went to business school, and I went straight from that to a nine-year career at Microsoft. Eventually, I ran a big chunk of the consumer products division for Microsoft.Then I left with the birth of our first daughter because Bill and I both wanted to have a few kids.
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Everyone agrees that the failure of our high schools is tragic. It’s bad business, and it’s bad policy. But we act as if it can’t be helped. It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them.
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The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child’s health.
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Around the world we have girls in primary school at about the same rate now as boys, but keeping them in quality secondary schools is where the world is lagging. I’m seeing a lot of countries look at this now.
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If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.
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In different places you run into myths around vaccination or around family planning. In the United States, one of the myths that existed for a long time, that has been completely debunked, was that autism was linked to a vaccine.
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If I really believe all lives have equal value, and if I use contraceptives, which I do, and if I’m counselling my son and my two daughters to use them, how am I not serving the women who don’t have access to the contraceptives they need?
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All lives have an equal value.
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If you want to lift up an economy in Africa, you basically start with the women.
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You are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.
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I think it’s very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they’re growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.
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When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.
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You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can’t get her to come and get them then they won’t work.
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We [with Bill Gates] started to make decisions about what we’d invest in. Then I actually started traveling for the foundation. I’ve probably been to India now eight times at least and Africa numerous times.
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As a parent, the responsible thing to do – if you love your child – is to vaccinate your child.
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Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It’s what propels societies forward.
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