“All women, everywhere, have the same hopes: we want to be self-sufficient and create better lives for ourselves and our loved ones.”

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.

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?’

It’s important to remember that behind every data point is a daughter, a mother, a sister—a person with hopes and dreams.

Bill and I both firmly believe that even the most difficult global health problems can be solved.

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.

As a parent, the responsible thing to do – if you love your child – is to vaccinate your child.

Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can’t even yet agree on what their laws should be.

If we don’t empower women, we don’t allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

Our economies are built on the backs of all this unpaid labor that women do.

Sometimes it’s the people you can’t help who inspire you the most.

If you can’t travel to the developing world, look at helping to fund a woman with a small loan and follow her. Learn her story. Learn about the difference that you’re making.

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.

I felt suicidal. I couldn’t stop crying. I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be great if the car crashed and I died?

Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda, and the victims of this paralysis are the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

We have to be careful in how we use this light shined on us.

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.