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.
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.
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.
Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.
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.
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.
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 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.
Women are the centre of the family. It’s the woman who decides what’s eaten in the house, when to have the kids vaccinated; everything that has to do with the children’s health revolves around her.
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.
With economic opportunity, sometimes it’s making sure that if they’re not in a place where they can have good jobs, that when they have economic opportunity, they have digital tools to use.
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?
