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Maasai couple in the Tanzanian village of
Mbuyuni, as they did in her homestay with
son Rory in Malawi.
“It’s not at all where we started as a founda-
tion,” Melinda says. “But I would say in the
last six, seven years, we’ve really started to talk
about this gender piece and have put specific
investments down to make sure we address it.”THE COMPLEX INTERPLAY between gender and
global health and opportunity is also the
subject of Melinda’s book, The Moment of Lift,
which debuted in April. The stories within are
often raw and moving.
But the real theme of the book—as it is with
all things Gates, it seems—is optimism: what
Bill and Melinda see as the endless opportu-
nities to fix what’s dragging us down and to
“summon the moment of lift for human be-
ings,” as Melinda writes in her book.
“The enormously impressive thing is that
Bill and Melinda both bring a kind of infec-
tious optimism that these are problems that
can be solved,” says Peter Sands, the formerand former chancellor of the University of
California, San Francisco, “one of the best
determinants of a child’s health is the educa-
tional status of the mom.”
“And so when you invest in education for
both boys and girls, which most of the world
happily does now, you’re investing in the
future of those women as mothers—and in the
health of their children.”
Melinda, who earned a bachelor’s degree in
computer science from Duke University and
an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School—and who
spent the next nine years at Microsoft—has
carefully studied the data on gender-based
barriers. And the data that wasn’t already
available, she has commissioned through
her foundation. But mostly she has learned
through in-person absorption—through a
kind of human osmosis: from listening to
women in self-help groups in India; from
talking to girls and mothers everywhere from
Bangladesh to Indonesia. The insights came
when she and her then 17-year-old daughter
Jenn spent the night in the “goat hut” of aIn Manhiça,
Mozambique, in- “Melinda
would sit on the
ground, talk-
ing woman to
woman about
the things that
mothers care
about,” recalls
one ally who
joined the trip.
“She has this re-
markable ability
to connect.”
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