The Moment of Lift

by Melinda Gates

  As my kids said to me that night at the dinner table, “Ouch!”

  In the moment, conscious of being on camera, I burst out laughing—probably partly from nervousness, partly because it was so bold, and partly because I was delighted that someone thought I had it together. I said, through my laughter, “If you knew how much I am not perfect. I am so messy and sloppy in so many places in my life. But I try to clean myself up and bring my best self to work so I can help others bring their best selves to work. I guess what I need to role-model a little more is the ability to be open about the mess. Maybe I should just show that to people.”

  That’s what I said in the moment. When I reflected later, I realized that maybe my best self is not my polished self. Maybe my best self is when I’m open enough to say more about my doubts or anxieties, admit my mistakes, confess when I’m feeling down. Then people can feel more comfortable with their own mess, and that’s an easier culture to live in. That was certainly the employee’s point. I need to keep working with Sue and others to create a culture at the foundation where we can be ourselves and find our voices. And when I say “we,” I’m not being rhetorical. I’m including myself. If I haven’t helped to create a culture in my own organization where all women and men can find their voice, then I haven’t yet found my voice. I need to do more to become a role model for others in the way Patty was a role model for me, and Sue is today. I want to create a workplace where everyone can bring their most human, most authentic selves—where we all expect and respect each other’s quirks and flaws, and all the energy wasted in the pursuit of “perfection” is saved and channeled into the creativity we need for the work. That is a culture where we release impossible burdens and lift everyone up.

  A Workplace Compatible with Family Life

  A workplace that is hospitable to women will not only forgive our imperfections but accommodate our needs—especially the most profound human need, which is our need to take care of one another.

  We have to create a workplace that is compatible with family life. This requires support from the top, perhaps with a push from below. The rules that shape the lives of employees in the workplace today often don’t honor the lives of employees outside the workplace. That can make the workplace a hostile place—because it pits your work against your family in a contest one side has to lose.

  Today in the US, we’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads—set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Even back then it wasn’t true for everyone. Today it is true for almost no one—except for one significant group. The most powerful positions in society are often occupied by men who do have wives who do not work outside the home. And those men may not fully understand the lives of the people who work for them.

  As of 2017, almost half of employees in the US workforce were women, and seven of ten American women with children under 18 were in the labor force. About a third of these women with kids at home were single moms.

  The old-fashioned assumption that there is a housewife at home to handle things is especially harsh for single parents. This is not just a personal problem, but a national and global problem; populations are aging—in the US and all over the world—and the task of caring for aging parents is falling disproportionately to women, which aggravates the gender imbalance in unpaid work that is already there.

  When people are torn between the demands of work and home, it can steal the joy from family life. We need our employers to understand our duties to family, and we want compassion at work when a crisis hits home.

  When I reflect on my time as a manager at Microsoft, I can think of so many moments when I could have done more to make the culture kinder to families. My leadership on this issue wasn’t great, so I hope you’ll forgive me for telling you a story of a time I got it right.

  One day nearly thirty years ago, a very gifted man who had been working in my group for a year or two leaned his head into my office and said, “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I wanted you to know that my brother is very ill.”

  “I’m so sorry. Can I ask with what?”

  “He’s got AIDS.”

  It took guts for him to tell me that. This was in the early ’90s when there was a lot more ignorance and stigma around AIDS. I offered as much sympathy as I could, and I felt uncomfortable that I couldn’t do more. He told me a bit about his brother, and when he was done saying what he had come to say, he stood up, said, “Thank you for letting me tell you,” and left my office.

  I pondered our conversation for a few days, and it became clear why he wanted to tell me. As I’ve said, Microsoft was an especially hard-charging culture at the time. It was intense and competitive. Many people didn’t take vacation, most of us were unmarried, and almost none of us had kids. We were in that short period of early adulthood when almost nobody needed us, so nothing got in the way of work. And this young man was an especially high performer. So I think he was worried. He was caught between his family and his job, and he loved both. I think he was hoping that if he told me what was going on, I wouldn’t hold it against him when the crisis hit and his performance dropped because he was loyal to his brother and wanted to spend time with him.

  A week or so later, I saw him in the hallway and motioned him into my office. He said, “What? Did I do something?” I said, “I’ve been thinking—it’s going to be really important for you to focus on our top ten resellers this year.” This was back when software was sold through retail stores. He said, “Oh, absolutely, I’m doing that. I’ll show you my list.” He showed me the list; he had the resellers all ranked. And I said, “In particular, I think you should focus on Fry’s Electronics.” He said, “Oh, yeah, they’re in the top ten. I’m already doing that.”

  He wasn’t getting my point, so I said, “No, I think that Fry’s is really important. It’s a relationship we need to foster. Anytime you need to be down there, go ahead. I don’t need to know about it. Just go.”

  Fry’s might have been in the middle of his list. They weren’t rising up or falling down, so I think he was confused by my emphasis. Then it hit him and his eyes welled up with tears. He nodded and said, “I’ll do that. Thank you,” and left my office.

  We never spoke of it again. We didn’t have to. We both knew what was happening. We were creating our own little culture. Fry’s Electronics was in the Bay Area, where his brother lived. I wanted him to know he could go there anytime with the company’s blessing. Long before we had a name for it, he and I were improvising paid family and medical leave.

  Paid family and medical leave allows people to care for their families and themselves in times of need. We were improvising because the company didn’t have a policy on paid family and medical leave, and neither did the country. Now the company does, but the country still doesn’t. Let me repeat a point I made in chapter 7, and I hope others repeat it, too. The United States is one of only seven countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave—joining the company of Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a handful of other island nations. This is startling evidence that the United States is far behind the rest of the world in honoring the needs of families.

  I’m an advocate for paid family and medical leave because the benefits are massive and forever. Unfortunately, we don’t have the data on every good thing paid leave brings to families, but we can quantify some of the benefits. Paid parental leave is associated with fewer newborn and infant deaths, higher rates of breastfeeding, less postpartum depression, and a more active, hands-on role for new fathers. Mothers are much more likely to stay in the workforce and earn higher wages if they can take paid leave when they have a baby. And when men take leave, the redistribution of household labor and caretaking lasts after they return to work.

  The lack of paid leave in the US is symptomatic of a workplace culture that also struggles with sexual
harassment, gender bias, and a general indifference to family life. All these issues are aggravated by one reality: fewer women in positions of power. A male-dominated culture is more likely to emphasize paid leave’s near-term costs and minimize its long-term benefits. There are huge personal benefits to workplaces that honor the obligations of family life, and those personal benefits turn into social and economic benefits as well. Unfortunately, those benefits aren’t calculated when the low number of women in positions of power leaves the shaping of the culture to men who don’t see and feel family needs as much as women do.

  This is an immense challenge for us. It’s especially hard for women to ask for money or power or promotions or even for more time with our families. It’s easier to pretend we don’t need these things. But workplace cultures that don’t meet our needs persist when we’re embarrassed by our needs. This has to change. If we’re ever going to be who we are, we have to stand up collectively and ask for what we need in a culture that doesn’t want us to have it. It’s the only way to create a culture that meets the needs of everyone with a job.

  We’re quick to criticize gender injustice when we see it around the world. We also need to see it where most of us feel it and can do something about it—in the places where we work.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Let Your Heart Break

  The Lift of Coming Together

  Earlier in the book, I told you I made a special trip to Sweden to have my last talk with Hans Rosling. In this final chapter, I want to tell you what he said.

  It was 2016, and Hans was ill with cancer. He didn’t have long to live, and he was working on a book that would be finished by his son and daughter-in-law after he died. I traveled to his home in southern Sweden, and Hans and his wife, Agneta, invited me to sit down and have breakfast with them in their kitchen. Hans and I knew it was the last time we’d see each other.

  He had a lecture prepared for me, as he always did. It was a lecture he had given to me before—but if you’re not repeating yourself by the end of your life, you haven’t yet figured out what’s true. Hans knew what was true, and he wanted to give me the lesson of his life one last time.

  He pulled out a piece of paper, placed it on the table between our plates, and said, “Melinda, if you remember only one thing I’ve told you, remember that you have to go to the people on the margins.” He took out a pen and sketched two roads running perpendicular and intersecting in the middle of the paper. Then he drew a river that ran through the point where the two roads met, and he said, “If you live near the crossroads or if you live near a river, you’re going to be okay. But if you live on the margins”—and here he used his pen to mark the four corners of the page—“the world is going to forget about you.”

  “Melinda,” he told me, “you can’t let the world forget about them.”

  He was tearful when he told me this. It was the passion and obsession of his life, and he was asking me to carry it on.

  The map Hans drew that day showed the geography of poverty. The extremely poor live far away from the flow of travel and trade that connects people to each other. But Hans would agree there is also a social geography of poverty. People might live in the middle of a large city but still be isolated from the flow of life. These people, too, live on the margins. I want to tell you about some women who live on the outermost margins—groups of sex workers in India who proved that when women organize, they can soar over every barrier described in this book. They can move the river and make it flow through them.

  * * *

  In 2001, when Jenn was 4 and Rory was 1, I took my first foundation trip to Asia. Rory was too young to ask questions, but Jenn wanted to know everything. “Mommy’s going to be away for a week,” I said. Then I stopped talking because I didn’t know what to say to a 4-year-old about poverty and disease. After thinking for a moment, I told her about one part of the trip: I was going to visit children who didn’t have homes and couldn’t get medicine when they were sick. “What does that mean, they don’t have homes?” she asked. I did my best to give her an answer that wouldn’t be jarring, and then I went to my room to pack.

  A few minutes later, she came running toward me carrying a bundle of blankets. “What’s all this for?” I asked. “These are my special blankets,” Jenn said. “I thought you could take them in case the kids don’t have blankets.” I thanked her profusely, and we both packed her blankets in my suitcase. Every time I called home from the trip, Jenn would ask, “Have you seen the kids yet? Do they like my blankets? Are you going to leave them there?”

  I did leave them there, but I came back from that trip with more than I went with—especially more humility. I met a woman in Thailand who shook my world. She had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and was a specialist in HIV epidemics. She spent several days touring villages with me, talking about what could be done to slow the spread of HIV. It was the number one global health emergency at the time, and health officials were predicting terrifying outbreaks, including tens of millions of new cases of HIV infection in India alone. I was a beginner in global health back then, just learning about the issues. Bill and I knew we had to take some action on AIDS, but we didn’t know what. I was taking this trip to help us find out.

  On my last day there, I was on a boat crossing a river near the borders with Laos and Burma, and my new friend said to me, “So now that you’ve been here a few days, if you were a woman and you were born here, what would you do to keep your children alive? What lengths would you go to?”

  I was startled by the question, so I stalled for a minute and tried to put myself in that scene. Okay, well, I would get a job. But I’m not educated. I can’t even read. But I would teach myself to read. But with what books? And I’m not going to get a job because there are no jobs. I’m in a remote region. I was trying to come up with an answer when she interrupted my thinking and said, “Do you know what I would do?” I said, “No. What would you do?” She answered, “Well, I’ve lived here for two years now. I know the options. I would be a sex worker. It would be the only way I could put food on the table.”

  It was a shocking thing to say. But after taking the whole trip in and reflecting for a while, it struck me that saying the opposite thing would have been even more shocking. If you say, “Oh, I would never do that,” then you’re saying you’d let your kids die—that you wouldn’t do everything in your power to help them live. And you’re saying something else, too. You’re saying, “I’m above these people.” She had worked with sex workers on other health crises, so her question to me had an edge to it, implied but still powerful: “How can you partner with them if you think you’re above them?”

  Two years after I returned from that trip, our foundation launched an HIV prevention program for India that relied on the leadership of sex workers. We called it Avahan, a Sanskrit word for “call to action.” It was a high-stakes bet, not just because so many lives were at risk but because we didn’t really know what we were doing. No one did. The world had never seen anything like this: a country with more than a billion people facing a deadly epidemic whose defeat would have to involve an extensive partnership with the most despised group in a deeply caste-conscious society. Ordinarily, we would launch a smaller program and build it up, but there wasn’t time; we had to scale it up at the start. It became one of the largest HIV prevention projects in the world, with the goal of turning back the epidemic all across India.

  Sex workers had to play a central role in the project because sex work was one of the critical pathways for the disease. If one person with HIV gave the infection to a sex worker, she could spread it to hundreds of customers, often truckers, who could in turn infect their wives, who might then pass the infection to their children during pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding. If, however, sex workers were able to negotiate condom use with their clients, the sex workers’ risk of becoming infected would plunge, and so would their risk of passing it on. That was the strategy—decrease the instances of unprotected sex between sex workers an
d their clients. But this ran into the challenge that can defeat even a great strategy: How can people be persuaded to drop one behavior and take up another? This is where Avahan turned into one of the most surprising and inspiring stories I’ve heard—and one of the most important lessons of my life.

  In January of 2004, when Avahan was less than a year old, I made my second trip to India. It was a trip with my closest women friends, members of my spirituality group. We wanted to visit places for prayer and meditation and see religious sites, and we also wanted to learn about the services available to the poor and play a brief role in that if we could.

  When we were there, staying in Calcutta, we got up in the morning before the sun rose and walked across the city to the Missionaries of Charity’s motherhouse, where Mother Teresa started her work. At the motherhouse, there is a chapel where the nuns meet for prayer every morning, so we decided, though we’re not all Catholics, that we would go to the chapel for Mass. On the way there, we had to step over homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk. It was morally wrenching. These are people that Mother Teresa would have stopped to help.

  In the chapel, we met people from all over the world who came to volunteer for the day in one of Mother’s homes. After Mass, we walked to the orphanage, where we were given a tour. My friends then stayed there to help the staff, and I left to meet with a group of sex workers to talk about HIV prevention.

  At least I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. The women I met wanted to talk to me about stigma, about how hard their lives were. And they wanted to talk about their children. I had a conversation with a woman named Gita who told me that her son, then in ninth grade, was on track for college. And she clenched her fists for emphasis when she told me that her daughter was doing well in school and was not going to become a sex worker. Gita and so many other women in the group made it clear that they were in sex work to provide for their families. They couldn’t find another way, but they were determined that their daughters wouldn’t be forced into the same choice.