MELINDA FRENCH GATES, 56, is the co-chair of the largest private foundation in the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, alongside her former husband of 27 years, Bill Gates, from whom she recently divorced. The multi-billionaire’s philanthropy has helped to diminish world poverty, and significantly contributed to the global elimination of polio.
SHE DOES
MEDITATE every morning.
SUSPECT that the advent of social media is at fault for the rise in vaccine hesitancy. “Disinformation is just too easy to spread, and that’s going to cost people their lives.”
DEFINE success based on a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.”
COMBINE generous financial donations with hands-on experience in order to defeat poverty. She has lived with the communities the Foundation has supported – particularly in Senegal and rural India.
FEEL a special connection to English mathematician Ada Lovelace, who worked on the first-ever computer programme in the 1800s.
CRINGE at some of her early ideas at Microsoft, particularly the invention of Clippy, a talking paperclip character, that caused widespread user frustration.
DESCRIBE herself as an “impatient optimist” – impatient for the world to get better, and optimistic that it will.
LOVE a certain film – The Sound of Music. When she turned 50, Bill threw her a The Sound of Music-themed birthday celebration. “The women were all in dirndls and the men in lederhosen. It was a ton of fun!”
ADVOCATE for women. Her book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World was a bestseller, and she founded Pivotal Ventures, an investment company that jumpstarts progress for women in technology.
SHE DOESN’T
DENY that she experiences fear. She does, however, advise young people to use their fear as fuel. “Embrace that jittery feeling and reframe it for yourself as the incredible, empowering feeling of pushing yourself to grow.”
UNDERSTAND why she and her now ex-husband are the subject of conspiracy theories. “I don’t know. I just think that fear is there, and so people are looking to point to somebody or some thing or some institution. And then once it lands on that person or institution, you get sort of a pile-on effect because of social media, and it’s deeply, deeply concerning for society.”
FORGET to make time for her joy – she has a fondness for buying handbags, and loves to kayak around Lake Washington in Seattle.
ALLOW her religious beliefs to override her philanthropic ambitions. In 2012, she publicly vowed to improve access to contraception across the globe, directly challenging the Vatican. “Of course I wrestled with this. As a Catholic I believe in this religion, there are amazing things about this religion, amazing moral teachings that I do believe in, but I also have to think about how we keep women alive.”
RECOGNISE the perfectionism that she sees in herself. “I’m even hard on myself about how hard I can be on myself.”
EQUIVOCATE over her assertions, made as long ago as the 1990s, about the importance of funding vaccination efforts globally. She and Bill helped fund BioNtech, the German biotechnology manufacturer responsible for the Pfizer vaccine.
EVER LIE “Twenty years ago, I made a vow to myself that I would never lie, ever. Not even those little fibs that can help move a conversation along.”
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