You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Let's start, as so many gen X stories do, with Oprah. She's not my girlfriend, but if she was, I like to imagine she'd give me the kind of advice she gave today's guest. It starts, Oprah said, with a whisper. But if you ignore that whisper, it comes thumping you on the head, and that thump turns into a problem.
You might not have.
Oprah in your girl group to alert you to whispers and thumps, but Melinda French Gates does, and today I talked to her about the whispers that turn into thumps, that turn into something we know a lot about at this time in our lives, transitions. The whisper that Melinda and Oprah were talking about was the one that Melinda could no longer ignore that after twenty seven years of marriage, of raising kids, and running a global foundation with her husband,
Bill Gates, me, Linda knew her marriage was over. I'm going to read you a short extract from her new book next day about that moment when Melinda knew she couldn't ignore the whisper or the thunking on the head. It was incredibly destabilizing to find myself in that position. I had never ever imagined that I was someone who would get divorced. My three siblings are all in stable, happy marriages. My parents have been married for sixty three years.
I had spent almost my entire adult life invested in this man and our family. After all of that, to contemplate approaching my sixtieth birthday single on my own it seemed unthinkable, until gradually it didn't. At some point I noticed that quietly my default assumption had changed. Once I had wondered how could I possible leave, now I wondered how can I possibly stay.
I didn't travel a straight.
Line to the answer. There were days when I was certain I knew what I wanted to do, followed by days when I was no longer sure. There were days when I felt confident I'd reached a final decision, and days when I went back on what I'd decided with the clarity of hindsight. I think it's fair to say that even through this excruciatingly circular decision making process, my inner voice was clear and unequivocal that I needed to get.
Out of my marriage.
It was the other voices that made me doubt it, voices around me that asked a lot of questions, starting with but what about what about the kids, one of whom was still under eighteen? But what about our foundation? What about having to tell my family? I didn't really care what the news coverage would be like or what the headlines would be. But the thought of telling my very Catholic parents was horrible. And then there was the other complicating factor, maybe the most complicated of them. I
loved Bill. Not only that, but I valued our family life deeply, and I felt enormous responsibility to the foundation we'd started together. Was I going to rip it all apart? Was I going to forego the future we'd imagined for so long? That was an extract from Next Day by Melinda French Gates. And if some of that rings a bell with you, I'm pretty certain that just as you or I don't have Oprah on speed dial, we're all so likely not divorcing one of the world's richest men.
But the inevitability of transitions isn't only for the privileged. Next Day, Melinda's book is about the day after the big thing happens, As French Gates writes, the real work starts the next day. The next day, when the graduation confetti has been swept up, or the wedding favors have been handed out, or the movers have departed, leaving you in a sea of cardboard boxes. It's when the real
transition truly begins. And we can all feel that, even if our transition don't make headlines and don't come with extra zeros and decisions that will impact global philanthropy, I'm Holly Wainwright, and I am mid and I don't get to interview the likes of Malinda French Gates every day, a deeply impressive, intelligent, empathetic woman who, after being one of the few female computer science enthusiasts at her school and then university, had a major role to play in
establishing Microsoft with her then husband, and an even bigger role after her kids were born in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had delivered more than seven billion dollars in grants by the time Melinda left it. Her purpose now is to advance the cause of women and girls, and she has already, through her pivotal ventures, pledged to donate one billion dollars to that cause over two years.
So I was nervous and delighted to have this conversation inspired by the book about the big transitions that Gates wants to talk about, motherhood, loss, divorce, career, shock, big birthdays. She was unsurprisingly warm and professional, boundaried, and full of the kind of wisdom I might expect from a woman who gets her life advice directly from Oprah. And so here is Melinda Frenchgates all the way from America. Melinda Frenchgates, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Thanks for having me Holly.
Your book it's beautiful, it truly is. I really loved it.
I was very moved by it. Often I wish I'd had a physical copy because I would have scribbled like it was one of those books that I took a lot of notes through. And I think that there's an
enormous amount in here. Although your life has obviously been certainly not ordinary, there's an enormous amount in here about the transitions that most grown up women, as I like to call us, go through in various at various times, whether that's you know, right from leaving home and starting career to motherhood, to the loss of loved ones, kids leaving home, and of course divorce. And there's a lot to talk about in all those transitions, and we will.
I would love to start, though, if you're happy to, with the chapter about divorce, because you write so beautifully about it, both with a lot of honesty and restraint. That chapter starts with a recurring dream that you were having. Would you tell us about that?
Sure? I start that chapter with a dream I kept having about being on a cliff and it falling away, and I was on the cliff falling away, and my family was on the other part of the cliff. And I'd had the dream enough times that you know, it didn't take a lot to figure out what it was about. And I knew I was at a transition point where I had some really tough decisions to make, and I
knew I could only make them on my own. And I talk about in that chapter amongst many transitions, but in that chapter, I really talk about distilling your inner voice, that you really have to listen to that place inside of you that maybe has been whispering to you for a long time. You've been trying to ignore it, but that you need to tend to it and see what it has to say to you.
That's exactly right. You say it starts with a whisper. I'm not sure if maybe you're quoting Oprah when you say that, but that often it starts with a whisper. Whatever that truth is, and it can be very difficult to tune into it. Do you have advice for people who are trying to tune into that, whether it's in a difficult part of their life, whether they're just worrying and ruminating, or whether it's really time to listen to that voice.
Well, I think that you can do it in several different ways, you know. I also talk in the book quite a bit about friendships, and in my case, many female friendships. I talk about some males too, but female ones. I think we plant ourselves in other trusted relationships, like really trust a relationship, pieces of ourselves, and if we're being honest with ourselves and our friends are being honest with us, they know us in deep ways and they've
known us. If they've known you over the course of your life or a long period of it, they also have a view on you that you don't always have on yourself and so when I talk about listening to your inner voice, for me, it was for sure journaling and starting by writing down what that, as Oprah calls it, that whisper was saying to me, really spending time and reflecting on it, but then also over a period of time talking to different friends about you know, how have
I changed, how have I not changed? What were my hopes and dreams? Where am I with those? And so I think we can if we spend at least in my case, time in quiet meditation or time alone, or also journaling, but also in the context and company of friends and or in therapy, you start to really, at least in my case, I started to really listen to my inner voice.
The book's called The Next Day because, as you write, transitions really begin the day after a life defining moment. I just want to read you a tiny bit of what you say about that you say, the real work starts the next day. The next day when the graduation confetti has been swept up, or the wedding favors have been handed out, or the movers have departed, leaving you in a sea of cardboard boxes. The next days when
we begin to make choices. Sometimes unconsciously about how we'll respond to change, what will carry forward, and what we'll leave behind. If someone picks up this book because they find themselves on the edge of that next day, it's full of wisdom, But do you think there's a particular piece of wisdom that's very useful for deep breath this next stage.
I would say, leave room for your plans to change. So on that next day, as you said, let's say you've even moved houses and you're sitting in the sea of boxes. You know, you may think that everything you carried from the old house is one you want in your new space, your new living space. But you know, when you get to that new living space, be open to maybe the lights flooding in in a different way than you expected, maybe you appreciate something differently in this
space than you had in the last. And maybe there's actually more you need to let go of that's in those boxes that you didn't clear out before you moved, before you start placing everything in its place. So I talk about in these transitions that leave room what I call in the clearing in that space in between. In a transition, once you've ended something and before you start something next, there is huge growth that can happen, but you have to leave yourself open to that growth.
One of the themes that runs through the book actually is from when you were a little girl, is that you're very goal oriented. You talk a lot about your binder of goals and plans and how one of the big lessons has been to allow the space for things to change right totally. There is a wonderful in the
chapter about parenthood. There's a really wonderful bit about this because you say that even in your first pregnancy with Jen, you realize the process of letting go of perfectionism started right when you were pregnant, because you were like, I'm going to eat what I want to eat, I'm not going to deny my Well things tell me a bit about that about perfectionism and how sometimes it can.
Hold us back.
Well, I will say in my case, but I've also talked to a number of other women, many actually, who we hold ourselves to this perfect standard. Whatever that perfect standard is, it's different in different people's mind. There actually
is no such thing. But I think sometimes it's because of either what's happened to us in life or messages that we get along the way of how we're supposed to look, how we're supposed to dress, how we're supposed to act in a business setting, in a personal setting, and if you let all of those voices in, you sort of create this image of who you're supposed to be.
But that's not realistic. And so for me at least, in dropping the perfection and saying, you know what, I'm good enough, like take me or leave me if you like me the way I am, great, if you don't, too bad. As soon as I sort of started to let that drop, I write about this in that chapter and I call it's the ease of letting go. You start to live into who you are and you let
go of some of those expectations. And quite frankly, for me at least, it cleared out a lot of mind space that I could spend on other things and other times. And in parenting, I learned the concept. I wish i'd learned it earlier. My kids were in middle school and I learned it, but I learned the concept of a good enough parent. I kept trying to be this perfect mom, this, do it well, work well, all of that, and there
is no such thing. It was an illusion in my mind and once I realized, once I read the definition of what a good enough parent is, I could say to myself, I am definitely a good enough parent. And guess what. It made me less anxious. It took, you know, this whole level of just I just let down and let go some and guess what, it made the thing
easier for my kids too. They talked about, oh, Mom, you weren't kind of on our case so much, or you didn't expect me to like look a certain way when I left the house, or you were less anxious. So it ended up being a really wonderful concept, and frankly, I wish i'd learned it earlier.
There's a piece of wet parenting advice from your mother, though that I actually scribbled down, which was you said, I don't know if neuroscientists would back this, but it
rings true to me. You said, the children come in sort of eighty percent who they are, and we're playing with the ten percent at the edges, so holding them back from the worst ten percent, I guess of their urges, encouraging them to push towards the ten percent best that I found that idea very very freeing in a way, and I think that that's really interesting as well as
what Michelle Obama said to you. I think this could only be your book where I'm quoting Michelle Obama to you, but that she says that my job is to set them free, you know, to grow into humans, not look after little babies.
Can you tell me a little bit about that.
Yes, my mom also said, you know, her job was to give us our wings to fly, and she, you know, she was clear that when we launched for college, it wasn't going to be easy for her. She loved us deeply, but I always knew that she saw us as independent human beings and that we should. Her job was to help us develop and grow and then give us our wings to fly and to be who we're supposed to be in the world. And so I took that into
parenting my children as well. And as I said in the book, I believe that about from her, eighty percent of their characters formed. And so when I could realize that, okay, I really can only affect kind of these edges, keep them from their worst self and nudge their best selves, I don't know, it just takes some pressure off, you know, and especially for me at least, it helped me appreciate each child for who they were, because my three couldn't
have been more different. A girl, boy, girl, such different personalities, and I hear many parents say this, and so even the way I parented each of them was slightly different based on you know, how tough were they on themselves
about their grades and schoolwork versus where they slacked. Was one of them slacking off a little bit, you know, and the ones that were so tough on themselves, I had to tell them to calm down, You're doing fine, right, And the one who maybe was slacking off a little you have to kind of prop that one up a little and go, okay, come on, you know, get down
to work for a bit here. So it helped me to see each child for who they were and parent them for who they were, not trying to mold them into some mold amorphous mold I had in my head.
Friends, there is so much more of My conversation with Melinda Frenchgates did not go away.
We'll be back in a tick.
In talking about that transition into parenthood, you also talked about the transition into being a working parent and the guilt that you felt. First of all, you talk about the transition of deciding to be the primary parent, the person who is going to be at home. And I
wanted to just ask you quickly about that. If you think, now that's a decision that every family has to make, and if sometimes that can feel a little bit like a trap for women because it's nearly always them who becomes that parent, what do you think, Well.
I think it's very different by family. Look some families, I was in an incredibly privileged position that we didn't need both spouses incomes. There are many families that need both spouses incomes if they're going to put their kids through school and have the house that they want, right, But if you're lucky enough that both spouses don't have to work, What I say to women is whatever choice
you make is going to be fine. Whether you choose to stay home and raise the kids and go back to work later, you choose to stay home forever, you choose to work full time while you have kids. Any choice is yours to make, and society should let you make that choice. So I think too often we sort of assume the woman's going to stay home. And yet I can't speak to Australia, but I can speak in
the United States. Of most parents today that have children, in both heterosexual and homosexual couples, both parents are working, So that is more the norm today than otherwise. And the other thing I guess I learned over time when I let go of the guilt of the fact that I wanted to work and have children. In my case, again, I was very lucky I could choose my work, and I chose that I really wouldn't work full time until my youngest ended up in preschool, that you know, I
would be home for those early years. But as my kids say to me now, Mom, we're glad you worked like you weren't this completely hoavering parent, helicopter parenting me, and we could see that you also got meaning from your work, and we want to work. Like all three of my children, our adults now they're in their twenties, they all want to work. Right, You find meaning both in I think if you choose to have children, raising children and in meaningful work.
Absolutely and clearly that was a very good lesson to show them, because in your particular case, I guess your children could have said, we're.
Not going to work.
And you know the value of it when you transition to being a working mum. You were working at the Gates Foundation, and you talk about the guilt and wishing there was another hour in the day every day, which is very relatable to nearly every working parent. Do you think that guilt, when it is very much a choice rather than necessity, do you think that guilt is harsher?
And when you talk to young women, because I'm sure that many women would young women would ask you about how to juggle career and family, what do you tell them about dealing with that guilt?
I tell them to work on it, to name it, to work on it, and that they are good enough. And I've also said I've asked many of them, do you know this concept of a good enough parent? And if not, I tell them what it is and I can say, well, do you think you're living up to that? Right? I think I will say this. I know so many young women that have that guilt, and I remind them
that this is kind of universal for women. But the sooner they can work through it and drop it, the better off they're going to be and their child's going to be. And I also will often point out to them, your child is thriving, I mean, and they really are right, you know, But we have all these expectations on ourselves as women, or society puts them on us. Other women and other men put those expectations on us at times, absolutely.
The empty nest because your children obviously are grown up. Now you write about the joy of being a grandparent. That's a big transition too, that no longer being my to do list is as long as my arm, I'm juggling everything.
Have you found joy in that transition?
Massive joy is right, Yeah, it is, you know, when you finally suddenly wait up and realize, oh, wait a minute. You know, I'm at a point now in life where my kids just don't need me as much. I mean, they still need you some in college, but then when they launch, it's even less right, and then to have these grandchildren. You don't get to pick when you have grandchildren. I don't know any grandparent that's got to make the decision of how old they were when their child has
a child. But it's a wonderful thing because all of a sudden you find yourself doing the things you did with your children, going down the slide again, you know, running barefoot in the grass, trying to do a summer assault. If you still can, and at least for me, it's quite motivating to do my squats in the gym so I can lift up those grand babies off the floor.
Absolutely just to shift gearze.
I hope you don't mind me saying, but perhaps my favorite chapter in the book, I'm the one that did actually make me cry was the one about the loss of one of your closest friends, about dealing with grief and lost John Nielsen. John and his wife Emmy were very good friends of yours and Bills, the kind of magical couple friends where you go on holiday together and you share a lot of landmarks. And John died much
too young. Among a lot of the beautiful emotional pieces in that chapter, there's also some very I thought, some very practical advice for people who are going through or trying to support friends through very difficult times in grief. Can you tell me a bit about ring theory?
Sure. Ring theory is this concept of understanding that the person who is going through the hardship in the middle, say they're sick with cancer or they're in a situation where they're dying. Understanding. You know, if you think about dropping a stone in a quiet pond, you see the ripples that go out, and understanding which ring you are around that person in the center is really important. Are you in the innermost ring? Probably not if you're a friend,
that's usually the person's family. Are you in the next ring? Are you one of the closest friends. Okay, maybe you're there. Are you kind of a little more distant than that, Maybe you're in a third ring, or maybe your business colleague, you're in the fourth or fifth ring. But knowing where you are, which ring compared to the person in the center, and then making sure that if you're grieving that person's loss, because you probably are that you're going to lose them,
you never dump that into the center. You always dump it to somewhere out in the ring, further out. And your job for the family and the people closest in in the ring is to be a comfort for them. And yes, you're grieving, but you don't put that on them. And I was able to get permission from one of
my absolute favorite spiritual poets and authors, Mark Nepo. He calls it being a greenhouse, and that's what I labeled the chapter, and that is even when you can do nothing for that person, no more meals, No more you know, interactions, no more phone calls, because they really are, you know, near the end. What you can still provide then, and all the way along the way is and light and they will feel it and their spouse will feel it, and they will know that it's there. And sometimes that's
the most you can do. And yet that is also beautifully beautiful and incredibly important.
That the greenhouse part is a part I immediately texted to a friend. So this is, you know, in terms of I think your book, as I say, helping a lot of people through transitions. I immediately texted that to a friend because I thought it was so beautiful. And your friends feature very prominently in this book because those relationships are clearly very important to you. And I'd love you to tell me a bit about your truth counsel.
Yeah. So there's a group that I walk with every single Monday morning that I'm in town rain or shine, and it rains a lot in Seattle, especially certain months of the year. And we have walked together now for over twenty years. And what I can say, it's three other women. One of them is Emmy Nielsen, who passed away his wife Emmy. We know each other deeply. We
have lived through ups and downs in our marriages. We have lived through you know, I live through John's death, as to one of the other women in the group. We've lived through raising little infants and kids, to middle schoolers,
to high schoolers, to college and beyond. We're now many of us moving into the grand parent phase and we just know one another deeply, and we try to offer comfort to one another candor about ourselves and our ups and downs, and even reminding people each other of maybe they're going something hard, through something hard, but we can
remind them of a beautiful time. Or maybe they're struggling with one of their children or adult children, and we can remind them the perspective we have on that child. So we just are really a truth counsel. And I call it that because for me, I wouldn't show up there and hide something from that group. And if I fel fel like I want to hide something and not tell them on a Monday morning, I have to kind of stop and say, Hmm, what am I hating from myself?
Why wouldn't I want to reveal that? What is it about? If they really are my truth counsel, what is it about? That because and that helps me keep on the path of my values.
That's a really interesting filter is to think that why wouldn't I tell these women about this? Obviously women supporting women are making their lives better as a massive focus of your life, and we will get to purpose soon because I think friends help us through these difficult transitions so much. Do you think it's very much friend's role to bolster and support or also to sometimes call us out when we maybe are not being that honest about what's happening.
In our lives. Are you the calling out friend?
Are you the one who'll say, hey, you've been complaining about this for too long now?
It depends. It depends on where that friend is in parsing through their deep feelings about something. So if they're still in a grieving phase, it's too bolster and support. If it's more in a phase of maybe transition, but maybe they're not quite seeing something that I have noticed, or they're not being completely honest with themselves. I try to think of a graceful way to bring something up, because I've really learned that in friendship it's really our candor.
We so often don't see ourselves right. We so often as one spiritual leader talks about Byron Katie that you have to look at the finger that's pointing out at somebody else. Say you're mad at somebody and you're pointing a finger, How dare they? How could they? You have to look at the three fingers pointing back at yourself, and so often we don't. Right. There's an old passage in the Bible. I think that says, why is it we see the splinter in our neighbor's eye and not
the log in our own? And we so often don't see ourselves? And so I feel like with true friendship, I do want them to be candid with me, gently candid, but candid, and vice versa.
Talking about the things that get you through the transitions. You write about meditation, and you write about therapy. You actually write that as a product of a sort of practical, very Catholic upbringing. You used to think that therapy was for other people until you found the right therapist. Can you tell me a bit about that journey?
Yeah, I think part of it might have been, you know, the generation I grew up in part of it, as I grew up in the South and I was Catholic, and so yeah, it seemed like it was maybe for other people. But then luckily again I had a friend, not as part of that walking group, but a different friend in one of my spiritual groups who gently said to me, you know, Melinda, when she saw I was going through a really tough time in the marriage, she
was said, have you ever considered therapy? And she was really gentle about it, but I knew exactly what she was saying, which is I think you would benefit from it? And I resisted the idea at first, but then I realized, no, she's right, I could at least just try it and see I might like it, I might not. And I even talk about in the book I had one therapist that just wasn't quite right for me, and I had
to switch to a different one. The reason I put that in the book is I want people to know it's you know, you do have to find the right match, and that doesn't always happen on the first go round. And that's okay.
You're right that you were going and saying there's this problem at work, it's a work problem, and then they was sort of like, I don't think it's a.
Work problem, but generally brought you to that that's that thing.
Isn't it about you not being able to see what's right in front?
Necessarily we can't.
We so often can't, And so again you have to have somebody who's not going to judge you, who's compassionate, who can let you work through that thing that's there on the surface that might actually be a problem. And in this case it was actually a problem of toxic employee. But over time they could get me to see that there was even a much deeper problem than that one going on. So yes, deal with that problem on the surface, it's here and now, but let's get to some of the deeper things going on.
The nerve to cool things out and make big transitions is the thing you've got to find in yourself, right, and you write about also finding that in meditation. Almost every smart woman I speak to on this show tells me that meditation is an absolute key part of what gets it through.
Why it's a game changer, because you steal yourself down and you can start to see your feelings and your thoughts bubble up, but you don't have to stay in those feelings or thoughts. You start to learn that, oh those will pass. Oh that's just a thought right now, Oh, you can examine your thoughts. Is that true? That not true? And at least for me, it's been a place where I can quiet my mind down the busy noise of the day, the busy mind, and just get a sense
of sort of essence and being. And it's just it's a beautiful place. And I can't recommend it more highly. And I have one of my friends in my walking group says, very wisely, do what you can, not what you can't. So if you can only spend five minutes in meditation a day, praise yourself for the five minutes. Don't beat yourself up that it wasn't ten minutes. Or you spend ten minutes in meditation a day, don't beat yourself up that it was ten minutes and not twenty.
Do what you can, not what you can't. And I think of it as those drops in the bucket. You know, if you put a drop in a bucket every day, eventually, maybe it's going to take you ten years, but you fill that bucket with water every day. If you put a drop of meditation in, you are going to change your life, and you'll change your mind, and you'll change your thinking.
I think enough people have told me this now that it is.
Clearly it is clearly true.
I want to talk about goals and purpose because you say in the book that you're something of a reformed goal setter.
What do you mean by that?
Like you said, you know, you were very driven as a young woman, which you clearly had to be because you were making it in what must have been, particularly then but still is a very male dominated field. So being very focused must have helped you enormously.
Yeah. So I write about goals and goal setting in the book, some of which honestly are highly embarrassing. I wrote down a few of them that I had I put in the book a few of them that I had written down as an eighth grader and it's high school. But it helped me, see, you know how, My goals hopefully are a little more lofty now and have changed. But I think goals served an amazingly good purpose in my life, particularly, as you say, because I was in, you know, a very male dominated feel I was a
computer scientist in college. I worked at Microsoft in the early days, so it me going. It kept me focused and driven. I still to this day have goals in mind and ideas of where I'm going, but I'm not as rigid about them. I leave room for more growth and more openings and more flexibility, Like, okay, I mean a big lofty goal I have is how do we
lift women up all over the world because families. I just know this from good data and from seeing it myself over many years of traveling families, communities, societies are better when women are lifted up and have their full power. So it's a big lofty goal to get there. But I don't have these rigid goals of Okay, this year we have to get from this number of CEOs to that,
or this many women in politics to that. It's much more that I leave room for flexibility and change depending on the strategies I'm trying to evoke, and quite frankly, based on even the economic or the political environment. So I still have goals, but they're a little bit more loose, is what I would say.
So would you advise women who are maybe again on the edge of one of these big transitions and they can't yet see, like if you're you know, if you're going through a marriage breakdown or if you're in grief, the idea that there is another side can be very hard to see. Do you think goals play a real part in helping you get there, like the stepping stones to get there?
Well, I can only speak to my experience, and I would say, at least for me during that time, no, having somebody hold out the perspective for me that, look, your life is going to be beautiful on the other side at some point. Yes, even once you once it's finalized, will certainly be rough patches of things having to get
sorted out. But having somebody hold that perspective. But at least when you're in that transition, or I was in that transition, there was so much grief and pain that I, you know, I couldn't see whether I was going to have a wave of one day or be just fine. Some days I'd wake up and I was kind of just fine, and other days I was just you know, could hardly pick myself up to go to work. And so, at least for me, I wouldn't say goals helped. Then.
It was more just knowing I was growing and I was going to be okay, and that I was surrounded by other you know, just really close family and friends. As I was going through a difficult time, and I also will say I learned that you need to at least you need to lean into that kind of support in a way that maybe you never have before.
Yeah, women are very good at being I'm fine.
I don't need it. I'm fine.
Don't worry about me looking after everybody else. I appreciated your generosity of including an anecdote though during your divorce of one time when you pulled the car over and listened to a sad song and how to cry, and then just got.
Back on the road and kept driving. I thought, that's very relatable. Fail, the failing, get it out. Let's get on with it.
After this shortbreak, the rest of my conversation with the very brave and very wise Melinda French Gates, including her decision to leave the foundation that she had spent so much of her life building. Your transition is in stages, as you were saying, you know, obviously there was your separation, and then that you were still very much involved with the Gates Foundation. Now you have your own organization, which,
as you say, is very focused on women. I would love you to tell me a bit about Pivotal and also how you're feeling about this mission of lifting women up in what is, let's be honest, a very difficult time globally, and sometimes it can feel like our daughters, maybe granddaughters too, are not even going to have the same rights that we had. How is it feeling well.
Part of my decision to leave the Gates Foundation was one it's in very good shape and that work will continue as a great board, a great CEO, good leadership. So I knew that work would continue to go forward and go forward well. But I also felt that with watching our rights rolled back even in the United States, a decision taken by our Supreme Court, literally my granddaughter right now has less rights than I had growing up.
That just shouldn't be. And so when you see such a big step back, for me, it's a call to action. It's saying, Okay, we've got to work on this, We've got to do far more. And so I started to look at you know what's going on here? Why have so many organizations been on the defensive on this issue. Well, they haven't been well funded. We don't do a lot of funding to gender based organizations. And so I came out of the Foundation and I immediately made a one
billion dollar commitment. A piece of it is to support organizations really holding up women's rights. Another piece of it is for women's health. We don't do great basic science research for women's health come out with drugs that will help women for diseases that are specific to them or
that they experience differently than men. Another piece of it was supporting global leaders who are pushing forward women's rights, whether it's the women Shabana in Afghanistan who's dedicated her life to making sure Afghani girls get educated, or whether it's other global leaders thinking about, you know, how do we expand women's rights and access for women's So I wanted to signal that I think this is just a really important place that we need to make investments, and
so I'm hopefully also role modeling and leading by example.
Absolutely, can it be difficult too? I mean, I know that you can affect change at so many different levels, but can it be difficult to remain optimistic and positive
in the face of everything that's happening? And also I wonder about that more broadly for you, because you have obviously for decades with the Gates Foundation, traveling the world seeing real disadvantage and very difficult situations, particularly for women in goals, but not only how do you remain positive, optimistic focused on the mission?
Well. I write about this a bit in my previous book in twenty nineteen, The Moment of Lift, which is you know, I have traveled the globe and been in many difficult situations in low income countries where you see the devastation of poverty. You see women who are barely eking out a living in a very small field, and they have five children, right, and they can't find work
and their husband can't find work. I always remember that, first of all, I'm unbelievably lucky both to be in those situations where the women will share their deep stories of their life, but that I get to leave at the end of the day, right when the trip's over, I get to go home and I have warm running water in a clean shower and a toilet. Right. So you have to hold both of those things in juxtaposition, and I talk about in that book you have to
actually feel the feelings and let your heart break. I mean, my heart breaks for these families that they're in that situation. What if that was me? What if that was my children? Right, So you have to feel the feelings and let them move through you, and that can take some time, and then I can move from there to say, Okay, now what do I do? What's the call to action here? About how I might incentivize others, myself and others to help lift up people in those situations and to keep hope.
I look for moments of light and joy, you know, you look for someone who's just simply kind to somebody else who's I was in a situation in Malawi with a family who had some food but not a lot, and you know what they were doing. Every night they would take a meal. The mom would, after she'd finished the day making the meal for her family, serving it, she would give a meal to her oldest child and have them walk it to a woman in the village whose husband had died a year before, and so they
were feeding that woman every night. She could count on a meal from them, from part of their family meal. And I thought, my gosh, I mean they are barely eking it out over here, and yet talk about giving
something to your neighbor. Right, So when you see these points of light and these moments of joy, or I have a moment of joy even with one of my granddaughters, you know, it just fills you up and you remember that it's all these little drops in the bucket or points of light that ultimately lead to good things, even when there are big world setbacks.
I wanted to ask about that in terms of us getting older. I know sometimes I look at my own mother, who's a strong feminist woman, and sometimes she can get very disheartened that at this point in her life she feels like that's being rolled back a little bit. And I know that you work with so many amazing young women.
Are you OPTI?
I am? I am When I see the way young women are approaching their bodily autonomy or approaching work, or by hook or by crook, getting themselves through college, you know, they have opportunities that our mothers did not have. Is it easy? No? And are there still lots of barriers? Yes, but you are seeing more women starting to make it in society. Have they reached all the top levels and
the right numbers? Definitely not? But are more of them graduating from college and getting the career that they would choose to get in some countries. Yes? And so I constantly look for those points of light, And so I'm I stay a realist about what the truth is because I look at the data a lot. I help collect the data on women around the world, but I also remain an optimist. I also try to remember that societal
norms and movements to take a long time. You know, we're working on something really hard here changing norms, but it is possible. And you know, I even look at over the course of Nelson Mandela's life, Look how long it took him to get the change she and others were pushing for in Africa, but he ultimately got it. So sometimes it is, you know, a step forward and it feels like, oh, two steps back, but you just got to keep marching forward and hoping those steps stay forward over the long term.
For the version of you that was studying computer science and was the only, well one of the very few women in that world, hopefully that at the time that has shifted. But yet it seems still looks, certainly visually at the moment, very front and center for all of us lots of male tech leaders. Do you think that that is shifting enough or do you think that representation of this sort of extreme masculinity in that world is a bit excluding to women still?
Well, I never like anything that pits men versus women. So optically you're seeing a set of technology billionaires. Let's call them out, you know, kind of front and center. But here's what I would say. At the time I was in college, women were on the rise like men. In computer science, we got up to about thirty seven percent. Just like law and medicine in the United States, law and medicine kept going up, and now we graduate about fifty percent females. fIF you're sent males in medicine and
in law. Computer science, it went up, and it took a precipitous drop. There has been, though, a concerted effort over the last five years to start to bring those numbers back up, and they are coming back up in computer science. So I will know that we are finally making it when I see, you know, fifty percent of graduates in computer science being women. But it will take a long time for women's to get to the upper echelons of those fields. Women still aren't there in medicine.
They're getting there in the law, but it just takes time.
This book required a lot of vulnerability from you, and I wanted to ask about that as you again in relation a little bit to age. One of the very smart journalists I interviewed once on this show is saying that one of the paradoxes of ages that you get wiser and stronger, but your skin also gets thinner. Almost you can feel a lot of suffering of the people around you in a way that when you were young it bounced off you more. Is that something you experienced.
Is it getting more difficult for you to see the suffering around you or are you confident enough in your mission to stay strong on that.
I don't think it's getting harder. I guess maybe because I traveled so much to so many low income countries. It was so painful for me in my thirties and forties and fifties, especially when I'm raising young children to go out and see a mom or dad with a child who's dying of something that they wouldn't die of in the United States. Dates like I've seen babies, three babies seconing on one oxygen canister in the developing world, right and you can see the terror in the parent's
eyes because the kids have pneumonia. They don't know if they're going to get through it. So, at least for me, I wouldn't say it's gotten harder. I think it's made me more determined to put investments and resources in my voice and decision making behind these issues. And I'm in a very lucky position that I can even do that.
Was it difficult for you to be so vulnerable in this book and write it the way that you have, As I say, it's very emotional book. Was it a difficult choice?
It was difficult. They are parts of it, like the chapter on my friend John's death, you know, going back to my notes from that time, the photos, that is very difficult and very raw, and yet I thought it would be beneficial that I thought there might be something that I had learned and experienced. One of my friends says that aging is just another form of living. Right when you get to sixty, It's like, hey, I've lived
a lot of years. I've lived six decades. So to me, it felt worth sharing those things, even if they were raw and vulnerable at times, because my hope is they might be helpful to somebody else going through one of those types of transitions.
I think, absolutely, will you write it isn't in that chapter, but it's a little further on you. Right, all of us have lost something on the journey here. A dear friend, a sister, a parent, a job we loved, a healthy working body. None of us gets this far in life with everything intact.
It's true, Yeah, it's true.
On that the idea that aging is just another word for living. There's a lot of focus at the minute that maybe we can beat aging entirely. With the right resources and technology, we could live forever. I think you would know about that, chap Bran Johnson, what are your feelings about that? What are your feelings about that? In a place to put resource?
Well, I know some of the things he's doing. I think it be kind of an exhausting way to live. I'd rather live with the time I have. Right, there's age span and then there's health span and lifespan. Right, And for me, it's about, you know, living each day to its fullest. We're not going to beat mortality. We're just not. And so to me, it's about gathering the wisdom and the lessons. Like I gathered a lot of wisdom and lessons from my friend John who passed away.
I had another friend, close friend who was in the early fifties I was in my forties who passed away. Look, we don't get to choose necessarily when we die and quite you know, you could be in a car accident today tomorrow. So live the most while you're here is the way I like to focus my time.
Absolutely.
You write about the practices and rituals and methods that get you through. We've talked about some of them today.
Your life. Now you are on the other side.
I don't know if you see it this way, but you're on the other side of this very intense period of transition. What are the things that you do now every day that might be helpful to people to grounding themselves in a new reality, as it were.
I still meditate every morning, I have my favorite coffee. I try to get some time and nature in the mornings before I go into work, or before I even go out for a walk with friends or go to the gym to do my exercise, So taking that time in quiet and then I also am very purposeful these days about putting the news down and not letting myself get caught at night when I'm tired, I might get caught more in the doom scrolling as you know the young people call it, or you know, following the news.
I really try to put my phone away after dinner and just do something in the evenings that I enjoy doing, whether it's a dinner with a friend, or it's watching something fun on you know, one of the streaming services, just kind of get away from all the news of the day.
That is one of the big things of the moment the people are battling between. I need to be aware. I need to be across all these things that are happening. You can't look away because you know the standards you walk past.
Et cetera.
But it is very bad for us to swim in that much negativity, isn't it.
I think we need to be purposeful about how we dip into the news and read it. Certainly we want to be informed citizens. Certainly we need to know where to speak up and use our voices, or use our resources, or write our parliamentarian or our senator. So I think it's super important for citizen read to be informed. But I think we have to be very purposeful because we are.
We also have to remember, you know, I think back to when my parents used to watch the news on TV at night and we were little kids, you know, before dinner or right after dinner. You know, it was kind of thirty minutes of the news and might be Walter cronkaid in the World News, but you weren't hearing about this instantaneous shooting in a school or a bombing here, that it's just this constant bombardment. So now it's up to us to put the guardrails on it to keep ourselves healthy.
Finally, and that reminds me of something I've heard you say a lot that when you and Bill were starting the foundation, and obviously there are so many requests constantly for assistance when you are a philanthropist, and you have quoted often that Warren Buffett said to you, choose a
small target. That's really interesting because I think that even for those of us who aren't thinking about it literally like that, with a philanthropic fortune, that can be very useful, even in terms of what you were just talking about, rather than the overwhelm of the everything, to focus in on a small target.
Or sure, do you think for sure? Let's say you've set aside in your budget that you're going to give away the equivalent of two hundred and fifty dollars a year or the equivalent of a thousand dollars a year, knowing what you most care about and where you think your resources can have the most good in terms of what you think could change something. Having a focus for it I think really helps. And same thing if you're volunteering your time. I tell people, look at where your
talents and your gifts are. Are you a patient person? Like? Are you a good teacher? Would you be a good mentor to a student after school or a coach for a team. Would you be better off being somebody who maybe prepares meals for a homeless shelter. Would you be better at maybe serving on a board? Would that give you joy and use your talents? Because if it does, you'll probably spend more time doing it, and you'll probably get more out of it, and the people around you
in that organization will get more from your talents. So I think being targeted in our approach for time or money or energy makes a lot of sense.
And even attention as well, right in terms of what you're going to focus on. Thank you so much, Melinda Frenchgates for talking to me today, being so genous with your time, and for writing.
A truly beautiful book.
I think the next day is going to be helpful to full content.
Thanks for having me, Holly.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Melinda Frenchgates. I have to say, as I had said in the intro, I was nervous to talk to her because gosh, there are a few more impressive women that you get to sit down with than French Gates. But look, if she can't convince me to meditate, nobody can. I think it's definitely time if you are wrestling, probably on a very different scale with the transition of divorce. I want to point you to some other Mid episodes that have conversations
around that. Vicky Parkinson, who was blindsided by an email late at night that spelled out the end of her marriage. Amantha Imba, who has remarried after falling in love post divorce, and she talks about how she made that happen because she really did like make that happen, And Julie Cohen, who talks about sexuality in midlife and why it isn't time to settle. Thank you so much for being with us through this episode of Mid and I hope you'll
join us again next week. The executive producer of this episode is named A.
Brown.
The senior producer is Grace Ruveray. The producer is Charlie Blackman, and there's been audio production by Jacob Brown.
See you next time.