The Moment of Lift

by Melinda Gates

  I asked if it was harder for the men to control their finances now that their wives had a say. All of them conceded that it was. But they said it was worth it because, as one of them put it, “now we work at what will help us both.”

  These gender dialogues in Malawi gave me a thrill because they showed that gender bias could be changed even in very traditional cultures. Gender bias is often unconscious. Let’s see what happens when we bring it to light. Let’s see the data. Let’s count the hours. Let’s share the work and build a sense of partnership. Let’s see how life improves when we end the false separation of men’s work and women’s work.

  MenCare, a group headed by Gary Barker, urges men around the world to take on caregiving tasks—and has persuasive data on why men should want to do that. Men who share caregiving duties are happier. They have better relationships. They have happier children. When fathers take on at least 40 percent of the childcare responsibilities, they are at lower risk for depression and drug abuse, and their kids have higher test scores, stronger self-esteem, and fewer behavioral problems. And, according to MenCare, stay-at-home dads show the same brain-hormone changes as stay-at-home moms, which suggests that the idea that mothers are biologically more suited to taking care of kids isn’t necessarily true.

  Balancing Unpaid Work; Balancing Relationships

  It’s true that women are natural caregivers and capable homemakers. But so are men. When women take on those duties exclusively, men’s abilities are never developed in those roles, and women’s abilities are never developed in other roles. When men develop their nurturing side, it doubles the number of capable caregivers. It helps men build strong bonds with their children that bring joy and last a lifetime. And it helps both men and women develop a wider range of their abilities. Even better, the shift improves the relationships between men and women by diminishing male dominance. Anytime you have a category of tasks that’s considered “women’s work” that men will not share, it reinforces a false hierarchy that prevents men and women from doing productive work together. Breaking that hierarchy actually leads to men’s empowerment, because it allows men to discover the power of partnership and lets them develop their caring side.

  In Journey of the Heart, an extraordinary book on relationships, John Welwood points out what he calls “a natural balancing process” between partners. He writes: “Anything that one partner ignores, the other will feel a greater need to emphasize. Whatever quality of being I deny, such as power, softness or playfulness, my partner will find herself feeling an urge to express more strongly.”

  This dynamic is what allows some partners to ignore things that they actually do care about, because they know their partner will do the work for both of them. A common example might be a partner who likes social engagements but doesn’t do anything to plan them because he knows his partner cares more about them and will plan them if he doesn’t.

  But leaving to your partner something that you also care about leads to separation. When one partner leaves the care of the children to the other, or one partner leaves the role of earning income to the other, they are cutting themselves off from their power—or cutting themselves off from their children. Perhaps the biggest cost is that the two are cutting themselves off from each other.

  There is a much better approach. Instead of one partner ignoring a need and the other emphasizing it, we share it. We don’t insist that the time spent on the work is mathematically equal, but we both acknowledge what the family needs, and we make plans to take care of it. It is no longer “this is my job, that is yours.” It becomes ours.

  If you rigidly divide the duties, then you’re cutting back on what you share, and that can hurt the partnership. Instead, you can push for a flow where you share everything in different degrees. You develop a partnership that is whole and complementary with a natural hierarchy based on talent and experience, where each can teach and learn, lead and follow, and two can become one.

  Of course, if you drop the model of “one partner does these duties and the other partner does those duties,” you may have to spend more time talking things out, but that is the path of growth. As Welwood says, “It is the heat and friction of two people’s differences that propel them to explore new ways of being.”

  Much of the research that I’ve studied on unpaid work is centered on households composed of a man and a woman and children. But we can’t expect patterns of unpaid work in a male-female household to apply to other family situations as well. We need to be alert to biases and gather more data so we can see what’s common to many families, what’s distinctive to certain types, and honor the different forms that families take—whether it’s families with two moms, or two dads, or single parents who share custody of their children, or couples who don’t have children, or households with grandparents and extended families.

  Equal Partnership—the Hidden Theme in Unpaid Work

  The gender imbalance in unpaid work is such a compelling subject for me in part because it’s a common burden that binds many women together, but also because the causes of the imbalance run so deep that you cannot solve them with a technical fix. You have to renegotiate the relationship. To me, no question is more important than this one: Does your primary relationship have love and respect and reciprocity and a sense of teamwork and belonging and mutual growth? I believe all of us ask ourselves this question in one way or another—because I think it is one of the greatest longings of life.

  Years ago, I was talking to my friend Emmy Neilson about life and marriage and some of the difficulties I was facing at home and work. Emmy is one of my closest friends in life. She was married to John Neilson, one of my best friends at Microsoft. She and John were Bill’s and my closest couple-friends until John died at age 37 from cancer, and Emmy and I have become even closer since then. I was sharing with her some of the challenges of being married to Bill, like sometimes feeling invisible, even on projects we worked on together. And she said, “Melinda, you married a man with a strong voice.”

  That was a piercing line for me, and I’ve been grateful to her ever since because it gave me perspective. I’ve been trying to find my voice as I’ve been speaking next to Bill—and that can make it hard to be heard.

  It would have been easy for me to let Bill speak for both of us. But if I let him speak for us, then some important things would not be said, and I wouldn’t be challenging myself, or him. I wanted to find my voice, and I wanted an equal partnership, and I couldn’t get either without the other, so I had to figure out how to get both with a man who was used to being the boss. I obviously wasn’t going to be Bill’s equal in everything, nor would he be mine, but could I get an equal partnership? And would Bill want an equal partnership? What would be in it for him?

  These are some of the questions I wrestled with early in our marriage, and I want to share with you some stories and reflections on how Bill and I moved toward an equal partnership—which, ultimately, is the hidden theme in every discussion of unpaid work.

  When we first had Jenn, I felt very alone in our marriage. Bill was CEO of Microsoft at the time, probably at the peak of his commitment there. He was beyond busy; everyone wanted him, and I was thinking, Okay, maybe he wanted to have kids in theory, but not in reality. We weren’t moving forward as a couple to try to figure out what our values were and how we were going to teach those to our kids. So I felt I had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own.

  Early on, we had moved into this nice family-sized house that I had picked out after we got engaged. He was fine with it. But a year and a half later we were moving into this enormous house that Bill had begun building when he was a bachelor. I didn’t particularly want to move into that house. In fact, I didn’t feel like Bill and I were even on the same page of what we wanted, and we had little time to discuss it. So in the middle of all that, I think I had a crisis of self. Who do I want to be in this marriage? And it pushed me to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do. I was no longer the computer science business e
xecutive. I was a mom with a small child and a husband who was busy and traveling a lot, and we were moving into a gigantic house, and I was wondering what people would think of me, because that house was not me.

  That’s where I was when I began the long climb toward an equal partnership. We’ve come a long way in the twenty or so years since then. We both clearly wanted an equal partnership, and over time we took the steps we needed to get one.

  Bill has said often in interviews that he’s always had a partner in everything he’s ever done. That’s true, but he hasn’t always had an equal partner. He’s had to learn how to be an equal, and I’ve had to learn how to step up and be an equal. We’ve had to figure out who’s good at what and then make sure we each do more of that and not challenge each other too much on the things we’re not good at. But we’ve also had to figure out what we’re going to do in areas where we’re both sure of ourselves and we have opposing convictions. That’s not something we can run away from, because we share every major decision, and if we can’t learn to manage the big disagreements through listening and respect, then even the small disagreements will become large.

  One of the most helpful steps for us in developing an equal partnership came after our youngest child, Phoebe, was born in 2002. I was working behind the scenes at the foundation and was content with that. Bill was doing less day-to-day foundation work than I was—he was still full-time at Microsoft—but when he was in public, reporters would ask him questions about the foundation, so he became the voice and face of the foundation, and the press began to write and talk about it as “Bill’s foundation.” That wasn’t the truth of it, and it wasn’t how we thought about it either, but it was happening because he was speaking publicly about the foundation and I wasn’t. So Bill and I discussed it and agreed that I should step up in public as a cofounder and cochair because we wanted people to know that it was both of us setting the strategy and doing the work. That decision put us on the path to equal partnership.

  Bill and I faced a second decision very early on that strengthened our partnership and continues to help us today. We had begun to hire staff at the foundation, and some people were saying, “Look, Melinda is spending more time on education and libraries and work in the Pacific Northwest, and Bill is gravitating toward global health, so why don’t they split their roles—Bill work on global health, Melinda work on education and the US programs?”

  We discussed this option as a couple, and we agreed we didn’t want that. In retrospect, it would have been a huge loss if we’d split our roles, because we share everything now. Whatever we learn and read and see, we share with each other. If we had split our roles, we’d be working in separate worlds, and the two would rarely meet. It might have been equal, but it wouldn’t have been an equal partnership. It would have been more like parallel play: I won’t mess with your stuff and you don’t mess with mine. This was another decision that supported our move toward an equal partnership.

  Maybe the greatest natural support I had for the idea that a marriage can grow and evolve came from my dad, who was a model for me of how a man can nurture his marriage.

  When he and my mom were still young parents, my dad got a call from a friend of his who said, “You and Elaine [my mom!] have to go to Marriage Encounter for a weekend. Trust me. Just go. We’ll take care of the kids.” His friend, also Catholic, had just come back from doing a Church-sponsored workshop on communication and marriage, and he was euphoric about it. My dad was persuaded, so he discussed it with my mom, and she happily agreed. Of course she agreed. My mom believes in marriage, believes in retreats, and believes in the Church. So naturally she’s going to do a retreat on marriage sponsored by the Church. My mom has done more than anyone else in forming and inspiring my spiritual life over many years. She goes to Mass five times a week. She reads, she goes to silent retreats, and she explores spiritual ideas with passion and openness and curiosity and has always encouraged me to do the same. So it wasn’t news to me that my mom was eager to do a marriage retreat with my father. The news was that he was excited to go on a retreat with her. They went off for a weekend and came home even closer, saying it was one of the best things they ever did together. The moral of the story to me was that a man can call another man and share advice about how to improve their marriages—that men can play a role as guardians and supporters of the union.

  So I took my vows with the expectation that Bill would play a role in strengthening our marriage, and fortunately for me, he also had a good model for that in his father. Bill’s dad has always had a very strong belief in women’s equality, which was obvious to anyone who knew him, but we uncovered even more evidence of it a few years ago. Bill Senior was participating in an oral history project, and the historian showed him an academic paper Bill Senior had written right after he returned to college following military service. The paper was dated December 12, 1946, just after Bill Senior’s twenty-first birthday, and includes this passage: “The most outstanding idea in Gatesland is the idea of the perfect state in which women will have all equal rights to men. The female would be as common in the professions and business as the male, and the male would accept female entry into these fields as the normal rather than the abnormal event.”

  That’s a look at the views of the man who helped raise my husband. (I’ve said with pride in the past few years that I’ve raised a feminist son; maybe his grandfather had more to do with it.)

  Bill also benefited from the presence of strong and active women in his family. He grew up in a family where his mom had a lot of say. Both parents were building his dad’s career, but both were also supporting his mom’s work in public service. Mary Maxwell Gates served on the Board of Regents of the University of Washington, her alma mater. In fact, while studying there, she met the student who would become her husband. Early on, when they knew each other only slightly, Mary asked Bill to support her for student body secretary, and he said he was backing another candidate! (Eventually, though, he made the right choice.)

  As a member of the UW board, Mary led the effort to divest the university’s holdings in South Africa. She also served on numerous corporate boards at a time when few women did. She was the first woman to serve on the board of the First Interstate Bank of Washington, and she was the first woman to chair the National United Way’s executive committee.

  Mary served the United Way for years in various capacities. When Bill was a teenager, Mary was on the allocation committee, and she and Bill would get into long dinner-table discussions on giving strategies. She gave him his first lessons in philanthropy, then persuaded him to launch the first United Way campaign at Microsoft. When Bill and I got married, his mom, who was very ill with cancer at the time, read aloud at my bridal luncheon a letter she had written to me. Her closing line was “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” She had a lot of influence with Bill. And he had enormous admiration for her.

  Bill’s grandmother, who also helped raise him, went to the University of Washington and played basketball at a time when most women didn’t do such things. So Bill comes from a family of strong, smart, and successful women. The impressions you grow up with in your childhood home make an impact.

  To me, it says a lot about the values in Bill’s childhood home that his parents gave us as a wedding gift a sculpture of two birds looking out intently toward an unknown place with their gaze eerily together. I put the sculpture by our front door because I like it so much. To me it represents the singular focus of a couple looking to the future together.

  So I think Bill wanted an equal partnership because that’s what he had in his home growing up. There’s another reason, too: He is a ravenous learner and loves to be challenged. When two people challenge each other and learn from each other, it has an equalizing effect. I often talk to Bill about my frustrations with the maddening slow motion of change. He’s good at seeing events against a large framework and plotting change in the context of history, science, and institutions. And I teach him some lesson
s on temperament.

  Bill was at a Caltech event in 2016 and the moderator asked him, “Is your approach to managing and working with others still evolving?” Bill said, “Well, I hope so. My wife gives me lots of feedback about when I’m too intense. You know, you can be not intense enough or you can be too intense. I rarely make the mistake of not being intense enough. I’m waiting for her to tell me, ‘Hey, you were just way too friendly today. Come on. You let those guys get away with murder, they’re wasting our money; you should have spoken up.’ As I calibrate, maybe I’ll find at least one data point in that regime.”

  A huge part of what made an equal partnership appealing to Bill is that it’s a much more fun and challenging way of being in the world. In the end, though, I think Bill was meant for an equal partnership because it aligns with his deepest values. Early in our work together, we realized that there was an underlying ethos to our philanthropy: the premise that all lives have equal value. It animates everything. And one of the things that has made this principle real to me—not as an abstract idea but as an honest mark of the way we see the world—has been seeing how the suffering of others can bring Bill to tears.

  That soft side of Bill might surprise people, especially those who’ve seen the competitive, combative Bill. That is real. Bill has those qualities. But he also has the opposite of those qualities. He can be soft, he can be gentle, he can be very tenderhearted.

  Great wealth can be very confusing. It can inflate and distort your sense of self—especially if you believe that money measures merit. Yet Bill is one of the most grounded people I know, and it comes from a clear perspective about how he came to be where he is.

  Bill worked incredibly hard and took risks and made sacrifices for his success. But he always understood that there is another ingredient in success, and that is luck—absolute and total luck. When were you born? Who were your parents? Where did you grow up? What opportunities were handed to you? None of us earned those things. They were given to us.