Melinda French Gates
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Well, the cuts of things like USAID are absolutely devastating for families all over the world. I Everything that philanthropy does is we try and find catalytic wedges and ways to work. We take risk where a government can't with taxpayer money and shouldn't. But then once we know something works, it's really up to government to scale it up.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
So to see that women won't have health services or there'll be more cases of malaria next year – It's almost unimaginable to me, especially given that both Republican and Democratic administrations really relied on USAID and not only saw the good work that it was doing, but started to scale it up even more. It's why we actually have less death and disease in the world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
To know right now in the United States that my two beautiful little granddaughters will have fewer rights than I had growing up, that just doesn't make any sense to me. And so in some ways it makes my work all the more pressing. And I'm still doing what I have been doing. I'm putting more money, though, now into women's health.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
I made a billion dollar commitment when I came out of the foundation that through Pivotal Ventures, we would try and really work on some of these places where Organizations, for instance, in the United States had been playing defense in terms of women's issues to help put them on the offense. But also we announced $250 million of that is for a women's health fund.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And we're taking proposals from all over the world to figure out what are ways that we can really advance women's health across the world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
You know, where it's the most chaotic and devastating is when you go out on the ground. So I was down in Louisiana about a month ago and to hear that doctors don't even know which services they can provide women with. What can they counsel on? What can they not counsel on? Women who are very concerned about their health saying, I can't have another baby, but where am I going to get birth control?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Or, wow, I show up at the system and the bias in the system, they're not even listening to what I know about my own body. So to think that we are doing things from the highest level right now in the United States that are making things worse on the ground, for moms and babies, it just, it's almost incomprehensible.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
I mean, to have a child, two children now die of measles, measles in the United States. Wow. When that is completely preventable, do you know how devastating that is for those families? That's where the chaos is. And that's where the saddest part of what's going on is happening. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Well, I think we all want authentic, real connection with other human beings, right? And we can't, you know, we can't really know more than, I don't know, they say maybe 100 people, 100, some people say 150. But, you know, I know who my closest family and friends are. I treasure them, they treasure me. I know who's kind of in my next ring and my ring beyond that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
But I do want audiences to see that, you know, great wealth does not shield you. But what I want people to know is that I'm a human being and they may put a label on me, but that label doesn't really define who I am. I know who I am. And so by being my authentic self, I hope they can see, okay, she's gone through struggles and hardship too, but come out the other side. And so maybe I can as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Well, my dad would often talk at the dinner table about how his teams, he was working on the Apollo mission, and how his teams were better when they had females on them, female mathematicians. And so as the teams would change and be reconstructed, he was always trying to get women on onto his team. And so for me, this played out because we would go in the summer to the company picnics.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And my dad would make sure my sister and I met those women. So we met not only the men on his teams, but we met the women. And I could see, literally see women in these roles, smart women that I admired and who I could talk to. And I would say, oh, okay, I guess my dad's right here. And so that played out for me as an influence of, oh, I could be like her if I wanted to be.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And that was having that role model, having both a father who believed in me and parents who were both determined that their children would all go to college and that they would take on the debt, which was a huge gift to us as siblings. But then to have these role models specifically in front of my eyes, that really had a huge influence on me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
I think, again, because he had lived experience, he could see that, okay, this engineering project, like putting a man on the moon, that is audacious. And he was a piece of it, right? But this see that his teens literally were better because these women were on it. He had a lived experience to say, this could be great for my daughters and for society. And my dad wasn't afraid to speak up.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
He encouraged us to speak up, even when he didn't necessarily agree with him. But he also believed in us. And I think that I cannot stress enough the importance a father's imprint makes on a daughter. Like my dad, literally, we were walking as a family. We would often go out to lunch on a Sunday and then take a walk.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And we were literally walking by this new IBM building at this sort of beautiful office park. And my dad, as we walked by, literally said, Melinda, you should put your resume up on that door. You should tape it up on the door. And I said, dad, what are you talking about? He said, they would be silly not to hire you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And he could see in me and my sister what I couldn't see myself, which was, okay, you're in college, you're getting a computer science degree. There aren't very many of you. And so they should want to hire you. And guess what? He was right. I eventually did get hired by IBM.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And her parents just she grew up in a day and age where her parents had two girls and they just didn't see the need for her to go to college. She certainly could have gone and left. And she ended up regretting that. She took some college classes later. My mom is plenty smart. And later, my parents start a family real estate business.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And my mom is the one, I mean, they're both running it at night, but it's my mom running it during the day and making sure all the pieces come together of all the various properties they have and tenants and laws and all of that. But she and my dad were determined that both their two girls and their two boys would go through college because they just thought it really was
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Well, I'll say when I was working at the foundation, I started to see through all my travels that The difference that when a woman could space the births of her children, it made an enormous difference in the children's health and being able to go to school and then ultimately the wealth of the family.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And yet I would meet so many women around the world who knew about contraceptives but didn't have access. And as I started to learn and study about it and think, is this the right thing for us to do as a foundation? I learned the history of contraceptives and when women had had them and under what circumstances and when they hadn't.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And I realized we needed to do something about this as a foundation. So I decided on the global stage. I'm going to set the agenda because for whatever reason, this has fallen off the global health agenda. And yet it's vital for women and for babies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
We were losing, we still are, too many moms in childbirth because their babies were coming too close and too often, particularly in these low-income countries. And then the babies were dying as well.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Yes. And I always say, you know, what is it that we value as society? Don't we value our children and our babies? Yes. If you value our children and our babies, don't their mothers need to be healthy? We know a mom is healthier when she can space the births of her children. So to me, it's that we are getting some of our values misaligned right now. And they aren't the values that I hold dear.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And I don't think they're the values that most families hold dear. To me, we need to really think about our values and align our government funding with those values. And we seem to be headed in the wrong direction in my point of view on those issues right now.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
Well, it's interesting. It's, you know, when we started out with the Giving Pledge, which was Warren Buffett's big idea, that for society, it was right that if you had earned a billion dollars, which I completely agree, if you have a billion dollars, you have an absurd amount of wealth. And so you should give back. at least half of it back to society because you have benefited from society.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
You've benefited from those laws or those roads or the people that helped you along the way to get that scholarship into the college you wanted to go to. You have benefited from that society. And so we set out to role model for society by,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
with the Giving Pledge, founded by Warren Buffett, my ex-husband Bill Gates, and myself, to say, if you're of this level of wealth, join us and commit to giving half away. Neither of us, none of the three of us, would have thought that we would have over 240 families now that are part of the Giving Pledge.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
And we have not just first-generation givers, but now we have second and some third-generation givers. And so they're also in countries, I think it's over 30 countries now from around the world. So we just didn't expect that it would grow that large. And I will tell you, there are ripple effects and knock-on effects.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
where they are also convincing others, even others who aren't of as substantial means, right? And what I always say to people is no matter who you are, the nuns in my high school taught us this as girls, you have something to give back. You know, they sent us out in society to volunteer our time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
My only point is we all have things to give back, our time, our energy, our intellect, and or our money. And I think that we should all look for ways to do that. And guess what? The funny thing is you also benefit from it. It's just an unbelievable kind of side benefit.