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Melinda Gates

Melinda Gates Books

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“Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts; it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way. Year by year, with the support and insights of friends and partners and people who have gone before me, I see more clearly that the primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do—and think they can do—for themselves and their children.”

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“In societies of deep poverty, women are pushed to the margins. Women are outsiders. That’s not a coincidence. When any community pushes any group out, especially its women, it’s creating a crisis that can only be reversed by bringing the outsiders back in. That is the core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill—including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.”

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“One of the longest-running public health studies dates from the 1970s, when half of the families in a number of villages in Bangladesh were given contraceptives and the other half were not. Twenty years later, the mothers who took contraceptives were healthier. Their children were better nourished. Their families had more wealth. The women had higher wages. Their sons and daughters had more schooling. The reasons are simple: When the women were able to time and space their pregnancies, they were more likely to advance their education, earn an income, raise healthy children, and have the time and money to give each child the food, care, and education needed to thrive. When children reach their potential, they don’t end up poor. This is how families and countries get out of poverty. In fact, no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.”

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“Saving lives starts with bringing everyone in. Our societies will be healthiest when they have no outsiders. We should strive for that. We have to keep working to reduce poverty and disease. We have to help outsiders resist the power of people who want to keep them out. But we have to do our inner work as well: We have to wake up to the ways we exclude. We have to open our arms and our hearts to the people we’ve pushed to the margins. It’s not enough to help outsiders fight their way in—the real triumph will come when we no longer push anyone out.”

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“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 wives who do not work outside the home, and those men may not fully understand the lives of the people who work for them.”

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“…calculated that if you hired workers at the market rate to do all the unpaid work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector of the global economy. … As Waring wrote, “Men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing,” especially as men recognize that “precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.”

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“If societies are going to elevate women to equality with men—and declare that people of any race or religion have the same rights as anyone else—then we have to have men and women and every racial and religious group together writing the code. … Diversity is the best way to defend equality. If people from diverse groups are not making those decisions, the burdens and benefits of society will be divided unequally and unfairly—with the people writing the rules ensuring themselves a greater share of the benefits and a lesser share of the burdens of any society. … That’s why we have to include everyone in the decisions that shape our cultures, because even the best of us are blinded by our own interests. If you care about equality, you have to embrace diversity—”

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“It is especially galling that some of the people who want to cut funding for contraceptives cite morality. In my view, there is no morality without empathy, and there is certainly no empathy in this policy. Morality is loving your neighbor as yourself, which comes from seeing your neighbor as yourself, which means trying to ease your neighbor’s burdens—not add to them.”

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“As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that's been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you're working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you're working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone. Women's rights and society's health and wealth rise together.”

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“Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.”

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“It’s not easy to transform a culture built on exclusion. It’s hard to cooperate with people who want to dominate. But we don’t have a choice. We can’t just make the insiders into the new outsiders and call it change. We have to include everyone, even those who want to exclude us. It’s the only way to build the world we want to live in. Others have used their power to push people out. We have to use out power to bring people in. We can’t just add one more warring faction. We have to end factions. It’s the only way we become one.”

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“I believe that all lives have equal value. That all men and women are created equal. That everyone belongs. That everyone has rights, and everyone has the right to flourish. I believe that when people who are bound by the rules have no role in shaping the rules, moral blind spots become law, and the powerless bear the burden. … I believe that entrenched social norms that shift society’s benefits to the powerful and its burdens to the powerless not only hurt the people pushed out but also always hurt the whole.”

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“How did the women's movement succeed in bringing peace while the men's warring factions could not? Leymah's story says it all: when the women were wounded, they were able to absorb their pain without passing it on, but when the men were wounded they needed to make someone pay. That's what fed the cycle of war. I'm not saying that women alone have the power of peacemaking and men alone are the cause of war. Absolutely not. I am saying that in this case, . . . when the women found their voice, the men found their power to make peace. Each found the traditional attributes of the other inside themselves. The men were able to do something the women had done -- agree not to retaliate -- and the women were able to do something the men had done, which is to assert their views about how society should be run. Bringing these two qualities together is what brought peace.”

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“Leymah's friend who came back to cry with her sisters, and all the women who ever accepted their pain without passing it on were not just sharing their grief but finding their voice because their voice was buried underneath their grief. If we can face our pain, we can find our voice, and it is so much easier to face our pain and find our voice together.”

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“The world is full of what seem like intractable problems. Often we let that paralyze us. Instead, let is spur you to action. There are some people in the world that we can't help, but there are so many more that we can. So when you see a mother and her children suffering in another part of the world, don't look away. Look right at them. Let them break your heart, then let your empathy and your talents help you make a difference in the lives of others. Whether you volunteer every week or just a few times a year, your time and unique skills are invaluable.”

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“If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.”

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