Find Your Allies Fast with philanthropist Melinda French Gates

0:00One of the reasons we make decisions out of fear is I don't want to be uncomfortable. Totally. Nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Like people stay in bad relationships for fear of just not having a relationship. Oh, that's definitely true. I've seen a lot of that. Every single one of us has gone through some sort of difficult transition. Whether we lost a job by our choice or theirs, whether we moved somewhere new by our choice or the choice of someone else, we often feel lost and powerless, and sometimes it challenges our very identity. And that's exactly what happened to Melinda French Gates.

0:34She has gone through transition after transition, and some of them were pretty damn big. You may know Melinda from her work with the Gates Foundation. She's the author of a new book called The Next Day, and she explores what transition means. And it turns out in these times of feeling powerless, we actually have more control than we think we do. because we can control who we surround ourselves with as we go through the transition. This is a bit of optimism.

1:07Let's make a transition to talk about transition. Okay. What have you learned about yourself as your life has changed over the past few years? What is the life you're forging yourself now? I've gone through a tremendous amount of transition. You know, I've written this book. I'm not done with transition. I'll never be done with transition. But I wrote this book when I've turned 60. I have two granddaughters. I left a marriage. I left the foundation. I've struck out on my own in philanthropy. And what I've learned is in that process, even though I was leaving things, just like I'd left my career at Microsoft to stay home for a while, then I went back to work.

1:46There is so much to learn in a transition and so much growth that can happen. and you find yourself on the other side far more resilient. So at least in my case, I have. And I think I'm way less afraid of change now. I'm much more like, bring it on. When you've gone through a lot of transitions and you've taken the time to look at them, examine them, see where you've grown, seen where you've made mistakes. Then when a change comes, it's not as scary at all because it's like you've been there before. or you've been in a situation of change. And just when you thought something beautiful might not come on the other side, it eventually does.

2:29How did it affect your identity of yourself? You know, too many of us define ourselves by the job we have, the title we've got, the role we play. And, you know, a lot of the transitions you're making are the job you have, the role you play, the title you have. How does that affect your own sense of identity? Like, who am I? Yeah, I observed. observed so I knew, you know, a lot of people. I started at Microsoft when I was young, when the company was still very young. It had just gone public a couple years before. And I observed in my 30s a lot of men and women leaving the company because they'd made enough off the stock.

3:07So they go on to do something else. And an observation that I made was that the women, at least that I knew, tended to do better in the transition than the men did. And I started kind of asking myself why, just observing over nine or 10 years. And I realized a lot of times women were quitting because they had a child or was a second child and they knew what their place was in terms of raising their child. Yes, they had a hard time saying, okay, but who am I still as an intellectual working person? But they were switching such a big role identity, whereas the men were leaving work, but then they were, who am I after that?

3:45And so for me personally, because I made that transition for the first time in my 30s from working woman from nine years to full-time mom, and I'm not saying it was easy, I definitely had an identity, a crisis identity in the middle of there, I realized, oh, I'm much more than just one of those two people. And then I start working on boards. And then I start working in philanthropy. And you start to realize you're a whole person. And so I didn't want to have just one identity. But I think if you lived kind of this one identity for a long time, your ego gets even more attached to, and then it is a harder transition on the other side.

4:22I don't know. What do you see? What do you see about people who've made good transitions or not good transitions? Well, I think somewhat of what you're saying, which is the women were going to something. Now I have the financial freedom to go be the full-time mom that I want to be, or take a little break to go be at home again. And yes, you deal with the, who am I? And I've seen that many times, which is like, if I'm not thinking every day, am I not a thinker anymore? Right? I've seen that happen with some wonderful and successful women. But at the same time, they made their choice to go to something.

4:57Whereas the way you're describing it, the men are going away from something, which is, I have the money, I don't need to do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to go into the great yonder. But I think the people who make successful transitions are the ones who go towards something and the ones that are going away from something, I think struggle more. Because I think also the decision-making, right? I think you're more careful when you go to something because I know what I want. I want to make sure it's the right thing. When you're going away from something, you're like, oh, I hate this.

5:25Get me out of here. And you take the first shiny object. That's not that. And you have to be so careful. We do it in jobs. We do it in relationships. We do it all the time, right? Definitely. I've seen it in all those forms. And you can even think of one female, high-level business executive, who as soon as she left something, And she literally was jumping to the next thing. And I said, I literally said to her at the time, I knew her well enough, don't do that. Like, just tell them you're probably going to take the job, but give you six months, you know. And she jumped to that thing. And sure enough, two and a half years later, she stopped doing that thing.

5:55Because it was just too quick, right? She didn't really know what she wanted. She didn't want to sit in that uncomfortable space of not knowing. It's hard to not know. What does that mean to sit in that uncomfortable space? And how are we supposed to do it? Going back to fear, right? One of the reasons we make decisions out of fear is I don't want to be uncomfortable. Totally. Nobody wants to be uncomfortable. Like people stay in bad relationships for fear of just not having a relationship. Oh, that's definitely true. I've seen a lot of that. I know how I went through it that was supportive of me.

6:30So I'll say this in case it's helpful to other people is I surrounded myself with good friends who reminded me, we don't know where you're going, but you will be okay. Like, here are the places we've seen you in the past, and you've been resilient. And yes, you're sad now, or yes, you don't know what comes next, but you're going to be okay. And on my saddest days or darkest days, I could also go to them and even share the hardest pieces, the grief, the loneliness, all of it. And again, they could hold up their perspective that I'm going to be fine, right? But I let myself go through those cycles of grief, anger, denial.

7:10And you go through them multiple times. You don't just go through them and, oh, done, cleaned up with that. That would be nice. That would be lovely. But you don't. But so you just, you literally have to sit in that uncomfortable space. And it's also part of why I do talk about openly that I saw a therapist. And I used to think therapists were for people who had something wrong with them or a problem in life. but I ended up, I went in because of a toxic work employee we were dealing with. But in the end, I realized, no, no, no, no. And I ended up learning so much about myself. The thing that you said that I think is really important to highlight, I think it's more important than even, I learned to sit in discomfort.

7:50I surrounded myself with friends who, dot, dot, dot. There was an action taking place that you didn't just sit in discomfort. It's like you put the parachute on before you jumped out of the plane. Like there was some preparation before the difficult thing. And that preparation was I surrounded myself with people who knew how to hold space for me to be uncomfortable. And I've seen men who've gone through similar transitions. First of all, I don't think they surrounded themselves with anybody. Worse, the other men who showed up in their lives to give them advice kept telling them how to fix their feelings, how to get over it.

8:32They kept telling them, get a bigger job to say F you to the man, you know, show them who's right here. I have one friend I'm thinking of in particular who he was going through transition. When I met him, I didn't know him that well. I don't know, for whatever reason, I found myself at a table with him talking to him about his transition. It was very raw and very new. one of the reasons we became close friends is I was the only person who said, just mourn, just be sad. Like it's okay. And I think what you said is so true, which is if you're going to go through some transition or if you're forced to go through some transition, because sometimes it's not our choice, the agency we have, we always have agency.

9:17The agency we have may not be to fix or make right the situation that is, but we do have the agency to surround ourselves with people who we know can simply be there and hold space for us as we go through whatever we have to go through. Absolutely. Well said. And it has to be a trusted relationship. As you said, you created space somehow for that person to feel trusted. And I think we do, men and women, but I see it a lot with men, we do them a disservice by saying to them when they're young boys, buck up. It wasn't that hard. Just pick yourself up and keep going on. No, they have real feelings.

9:55Let them feel their feelings and then go on, right? I just think, you know, sometimes we don't have all the right messages in society. And then if someone doesn't actually deal with their feelings and their emotions, it often comes out what I call sideways, comes out as anger at somebody else. It comes out in bad behavior. And so we need to have trusted friends. And as you said, hold trusted space. I think that is so well said. When we feel powerless, and we may be powerless in the situation, you know, divorce, getting fired, choosing to leave a job, moving, all kinds of transitions we're forced to make or we choose to make that are very disruptive to our lives.

10:38we haven't given up all control. The greatest control we have is who we go through it with. And I just love that you said that. If I were to interview your friends, and I would say, who is the Melinda you knew before the transition and who is the Melinda you know now? Many of them have said, you are so much more like either if they knew me in high school, the girl I knew in high school, or yourself in your 20s. Like just more open, more joyful, more willing to try new things, go out and look stupid, have fun, right? I just, it's almost, I've called it almost a learning back to myself. I knew a lot about who I was when I was in high school.

11:21I was lucky enough. I went to an all-girls Catholic school. So we were very much standing in our power. And even the nuns around us taught us to question our faith and to listen and to think about community. But I think when you get, or I'll say in my case, when I got launched out in society, then I started to come up to against what many women have described as the 10 ,000 paper cuts, just barriers in society of people who treat you like less or tell you you're less or, you know, and that stuff wears on you over time. As I really stepped into my own power at the foundation and understood my role and who I wanted to be, that made me start to feel more and more and more like myself, that I had my full voice and I was by God going to say what I believe, whether you like it or not, right?

12:11So if you were that young woman, if you were that girl, for some reasons we know, and some reasons we don't, it was taken away from you, that you lost a piece of yourself to some degree. It took 30, you know, 40, 35 years longer than you were old when you had it to get it back. How can we make sure that young women and young men, and particularly young women, don't have to spend 35 years trying to get it back? When your friends say to you, wow, you're like the person I knew when you were 20. Like, that's sort of a very scary thought. It is. Did they not enjoy hanging out with you for 35 years?

12:56Well, I think we had some, we certainly had some fun moments. Don't get me wrong. But I think I looked very stressed to them. Stressed, anxious, you know, more sort of buttoned up. And look, I think in my case, let's just say this. I'll just say women in general. If we sent young girls, when they come out of university and women, into society where they're more welcomed, you know, they're not harassed. They're not looked down on by other people. They don't walk into a room and when they sit at the table, they're the only one like them. This stuff happens all the time. And so whereas if you walk into an environment where it's fully welcoming of men and women, like fully welcoming, I see women step into their power far more quickly.

13:46But you still see those barriers. You see them in medicine. Even though we are graduating essentially 50-50 male and female doctors, it's still, though, I mean, who's at the top of the profession? Who's revered? it's the neurologist, right? The surgeon, oh my gosh, you know, and who's looked down on in the hospital? The nurses. But yet who's caring for us? Like who's really there at bedside most of the time? It's a nurse. Are you kidding? The surgeon might fix your bone and put it back together, but it's the nurse. So we have some things backwards in society. Can I pull on that thread and even push a little bit?

14:27Sure.

14:57business person, whatever it is. And so I want to go back to your own advice, which is maybe, just maybe, the way for a young woman to enter any of these professions is to have the agency to surround themselves with the people who will hold space for them, so that when they go through this, they're less intimidated, they're less pushed down, they push back, because the safe space is not the boardroom, but the safe space is the group that they've created around them. Totally. I mean, when young women ask me for advice, that's what I tell them is find the allies around you, the other women, the other men, you know, a man who's willing to hold space in a room for you at a meeting or say, hey, she just said that.

15:42Let's move on here. Right. Find those allies. But not everybody's lucky enough to do that. And I do think, I mean, that is one of the things I say about those of us who are, have found ourselves in positions of leadership, men and women. We really have to create the space. I mean, I finally learned one of the things internally when I was working at the foundation, the culture of the foundation is if I saw a man talk over a woman, just in a really nice way, I'd let him finish. And I'd say, OK, I heard what you said, but she also had something to say. And I just created space for her to speak up.

16:16And boy, sometimes the ideas that would come out, everybody would be like, oh my gosh, okay. So I think if we're a bit older and we're in a position of leadership, we need to create that for others. And if we're in a peer situation, we have to be allies of others for sure. And the best way to do it is to be in service, right? If you want to select people to surround yourself with, to give you the support and love as you go through the transitions of life, then we have to accept the responsibility to be a part of the communities for others as they go through the transitions of life as well. It's a give and a take.

16:55It's not just a take. Well said. Definitely. So you've done a lot of work in women's empowerment and celebrating women in the world. beyond the obvious. Is there a particular reason you went down that road and not one of the many, many other roads that somebody who's interested in helping the world and advancing the greater good would take? I had been working in philanthropy for over a decade and doing large-scale grants, traveling the world, meeting so many people all over the world on the ground and seeing their lives. And I came to realize that if we didn't invest in women, we weren't getting the most out of our grant making.

17:38We just weren't. Because everywhere you went, all over the world, it was the women who predominantly were in charge of the family. And so she decided, especially in a low - or middle-income country, who eats and in what order and what the finances of the family are spent upon. And on the converse side, when she would have resources, she was far more likely, we knew from very good research, to invest in her children than her spouse was. It's such an interesting point, right? Which is it's not really, it's not born out of feminism per se. It's born out of efficiency. Absolutely. For me, this is not an argument about, you know, this is just the right thing to do, or it's time.

18:25It's an argument born out of, if we want the world to get better, invest in women. And if you're not looking at that piece of it, I'll give you a specific example. If we, which we were, were investing in a seed that was more drought resistant or pest resistant for an area. So, okay, the farmers are getting more yield off their farm. They can put more on the market. They can make more money. They can feed their kids more. But what was happening is 50 percent of the farmers were women, but those seeds weren't getting to them because guess what? They couldn't go to the person who was the agri dealer giving out the seeds and selling the seeds.

19:04Women, for lots of reasons, were stuck on the farm. So it's like, OK, we're getting half of what we ought to out of this grant making. So, yes, it was an efficiency argument. And we know this, you know better than I do. Muhammad Yunus, when he started doing his microloans, he knew that women that he gave microloans to were more likely to pay back their loans than the men. That's right. By significant numbers. And so again, an efficiency argument. And I guess there's an irony to this, right? Because it's the patriarchal system in so many of these developing countries where the husband is the alpha of the family, even though the woman's looking after the kids, cleaning the house, doing the farming, that actually works counter here because the men are using money for other reasons other than their families.

19:58So if you want to invest in a community that advances money further, you give it to the women. I just think there's an irony where the men are supposed to be the protectors. It actually backfires because of the way they spend money. It is an irony. And I would say not just in low-income countries. The world has inadvertently, no wrongdoing in it, but the world has inadvertently been set up for men. Look at our own constitution in the United States. Women did not have the right to vote. They weren't essentially seen in the constitution. So what happened then was we set up a society even here where our workplaces were places that became, if you think about after the industrial revolution, were set up really for men to go to the office.

20:48And we assumed women would take the child giving, caregiving role, right? So it got set up that way. But even today, in a high-income country like the United States, of all the couples that have children, 67 % of them, both parents are working. And yet we still, in this country, in this day and age, we are the only country in the world, in the United States, that doesn't have paid family medical leave of high-income countries. And so that means that you're putting a double burden for the most part on the women. And so I just look at society after society. And over time, the ones that tend to do better is when they start to really make sure that women can step into their full power.

21:36Yeah. Yeah. So you started doing philanthropy by bringing all kinds of resources to nations around the world. And the investment in women was about efficiency, not feminism. Take me down the journey, how you got to now and the new work you're doing. Well, so I did the work at the Gates Foundation for 25 years, traveled all over the world, which I was incredibly lucky to do. The foundation was at a point where it's in very good hands. We have a board. We have a fantastic CEO who I've known for 17 years. He's just doing a great job. And then there was a rollback of a law that had been on the books since I was a child for women's rights in the United States.

22:21I never, I never thought my granddaughters would have fewer rights than I had growing up. And so I started to see, you know, we all started to see what was happening in the United States. And here I am pushing for women to step into their full power all over the world. And my own country is rolling back. So I felt like, you know, the foundation's in a good place. I've turned 60. And it's just time for me to step into my next decade of philanthropy. And there's so much work to be done here in the United States. Not that I'm not still doing global work. I am. But less than 2 % of philanthropic dollars goes towards women.

23:04That just shouldn't be. You know, less than 2 % of women get a VC to invest in their business. That should not be in this country. So we're still in our country more than 300 years away from gender equality. And I thought, gosh, I've been to so many places in the world that look towards the United States, but here we are rolling back. And instead, we need to be pushing forward. What are the reasons for it? It's too easy to simply say misogyny, you know, or sexism or the system. You know, what are the reasons that that happens? That you said so little VC goes to female entrepreneurs, for example.

23:45Like, I'm curious as to what the foundations of why it's happening in the first place. I don't think we fully know. And you have to go sector by sector. But one thing I'll say in the VC sector is, or let's just say in the tech sector also, broaden it a little bit from that. Because I worked in the tech sector. I understand that to some extent. It has not been the most welcoming place for women. You have to go all the way back to the Apple II computer and the IBM PC. When the Apple II came out, lots of young girls were actually coding and being on it. But when IBM came out and started promoting the PC, they started promoting gaming and boys' games, and it became very gamified.

24:27And so boys really enjoyed that. So fewer women went into computer science. Then what happens? Okay, well, if boys are already playing with the computer when they're young and they go into college, they know a lot about it. So women go in feeling like I'm learning a brand new language, right? So you started getting, when I was in college, literally, we were on our way up in terms of computer science degrees. We thought it was going to be like medicine and law have gone to today. And then it had this precipitous drop. And then what happened was when you got women not going into the field, the industry where they go to work felt very unwelcoming to them because there weren't very many people who looked like them.

25:03Right. And so then, OK, who's the money go into the hands of who are the VCs? They're mostly men. So when they look at these businesses that are coming before them, quite honestly, they don't understand some of the businesses that are coming before them from women. They sort of laugh them out of the room. And it's not because they're necessarily doing anything wrong. It's because they don't have the same lens on society that a woman has. Right. And so it just becomes this sort of self-referencing mechanism and the flywheel gets going and the momentum gets going. And so we have to do is figure out how do you put something in there to stop it so that, you know, we can make it so more women, their businesses get invested in.

25:45I love your point of the flywheel, the self-licking ice cream, right? It's the system that perpetuates itself. Because if I look at some of, you know, you look at young male entrepreneurs, their standards of success or the bragging rights are how much VC they were able to get and their rate of growth. And yet there's no data to show that a fast growing company is healthier than one that's not. In fact, sometimes the opposite. But, you know, growth is the metric because it benefits the investors, not necessarily the companies. But that's their metric, right? How much money did I raise and how fast am I growing?

26:25Then I look at some of my favorite female entrepreneurs. You're Sarah Blakely or you're Carissa Bodner from Spanx and Thrive, respectively. And they raised no money. They built their businesses themselves with the few dollars they had in their pockets. They actively turned down VC. A lot of male venture capitals told them they were stupid. They both resisted the overwhelming pressure to go public because they didn't see a need for it and they didn't need to raise the money and they weren't looking for a liquidity event. And both of them built unbelievably strong, resilient companies. And the sense is that their metrics, it goes back to the same thinking as before with the efficiency, why you invested in the mothers in the developing world.