Melinda Gates has spent the past 16 years seeding social change through the world’s largest private philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She and her husband have presided over an endowment that has grown to $39.6 billion — and they’ve added Warren Buffett as a third steward. The foundation funds initiatives that aim to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty globally, as well as expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the United States. But even with such a broad mandate, it can’t do everything. So Gates is stepping out on her own. Though she’ll continue to work on the foundation, she’s building up a personal office to dedicate resources and attention to an issue of central personal importance: getting more women into tech — and helping them stay there.
It’s personal. Gates got her start in tech. After graduating from Duke with a computer science degree (and an MBA), she spent a decade working at Microsoft. That was back in 1987, when just over a third of undergraduate computer science degrees went to women. Nearly 30 years later, fewer than one in five CS degrees are earned by women. That, according to Gates, constitutes a crisis. “This has got to change,” she told me when we met to discuss her efforts last week.
The question, of course, is how. And it’s a familiar question to anyone working in tech. How should Gates spend her money and her time? I sat down with her to understand her thinking, but I also want to hear from you. Please comment below with your suggestions on how she should put her resources to use. I’ll correlate your answers in a letter of advice from Backchannel to Melinda.
Why are you turning your attention toward women in technology?
I was doing all this work in the developing world. I would be out learning about these issues for women and girls, and becoming extremely passionate about it for these countries, because I so believe that women transform societies. Then I’d be flying back home, and say to myself, “How far has the U.S. really come on these issues?” We’ve come a long way since my mom’s generation. But have we made as much progress as I’d like to see us make? No way.
When you’re talking about progress, what are you talking about?
I look at the representation of women in Congress — less than 20 percent. Some countries I go to in Africa have [representation as high as] 47 percent.
I go to Scandinavian countries, and they have these amazing policies to help men and women in the workforce balance work and family. How far are we on paid leave? We’re terrible. We’re back where Papua New Guinea is. I mean, it’s horrible.
I care about computer science. When I was in school in the 1980s, women got about 37 percent of computer science degrees and law degrees then. Law went up to 47 percent now. In medicine, we were at 28 percent in 1984. That’s gone up to 48 percent. Computer science went from 37 percent to 18 percent.
I started to learn about it and say, my gosh. To me, the tech industry is one of the best places to work right now. If I was working again, I would work in biological science or tech or the combination. Every company needs technology, and yet we’re graduating fewer women technologists. That is not good for society. We have to change it.
You’re building out a personal office right now. Do you have some set of resources you’re going to put against this area, or initiatives you hope to launch in the next year?
I’m still forming what they are. In anything we’ve done at the foundation, we go through what I call a learning mode. That will sometimes be as much as two years, where we’re learning, collecting information, talking to lots of experts, and looking at what research is out there.
On this particular issue, I am in this learning mode. Then I will figure out exactly what investments I will place down.
It sometimes feels like this conversation is evergreen in Silicon Valley, and it’s hard to create real change. Do you have a sense yet for where your energy is best spent?
I think there’s a couple of areas. The research is pretty thin on this stuff. We know when in history [women became less interested in computer science]. When I was growing up, all the games — the palm games, the Atari games, the computer games — they were all gender neutral, right? Then we went through this gamification that became very male. We don’t know for sure, but it looks like the correlation is that when the gaming industry became very male, all of a sudden you had women in computer science [drop off]. That’s changing a little bit, but I want to actually try and figure out if we can figure out some more of these correlations, so we don’t make the same mistakes again.
We all know there’s this leaky pipeline. It starts in elementary school, then middle school, then high school, and so on. I want to figure out the solutions. If you take each stage of the leaky pipeline: let’s just pick the part where women start college. Some of the best programs, UW, Stanford, Berkeley — or what [president] Maria Klawe is doing at Harvey Mudd — are finally looking at that very first CS course. If it’s completely geared towards an 18-year-old white male, and they are not thinking about role models for women or problem sets they get for women, how do we keep [women] in the course?
I think we can do a lot for the future by simply shining a light on the people who are doing the work now, so that people see folks that look like them.
Totally. We know that role models matter. If we don’t hold up images of women, of all different phenotypes of women in tech, so you go, “Oh, I don’t look like that one or that one or that one, but I kinda look like that one, or oh! She’s doing something interesting!” There have got to be three dozen phenotypes that you can identify with.
We know that in coding camps that girls attend, their perceptions of how they do differ depending on the posters on the wall. If there are all male-gender posters on the wall, they don’t feel very good about how they did. They don’t feel very good about the camp. If it’s mixed-gender on the walls or all female, they can see themselves, right?
You talk about the importance of measuring and researching. Why do you think there’s not more data now?
I don’t think anybody’s put money against it. What we measure is what we work on. In global health, up until 15 years ago, we weren’t talking about women. Ten years ago, we started talking about girls. It took a long time to get going on the agenda. We are just now starting to make the data investments. I can’t go convince governments to work on female issues unless I have data. I think in the tech space, men don’t really see a problem and a lot of the money is held by men.
Now tech companies are finally saying they care a lot about having females in the workplace. Google put some of the very best family leave policies in place right at the start. You’re seeing more tech companies doing that, you’re seeing the press finally push. This is one of the things I think is changing in Silicon Valley.
Transparency is one of the first things that makes change. My office went to look at patent rates for women.We couldn’t get a good number on female patents. We just now got the updated patent rates. Four decades ago, 3 percent of all patents listed at least one woman inventor. As of 2010, nearly 19 percent of patents did. But if you project forward, women won’t have parity in patents until 2092.
I think about the coming voice technology. As soon as you introduce voice, you introduce gender. The people who are making decisions about that gender, or that voice, are usually marketing people. Usually mid-level marketing people who have very little connection to the larger social goal. They’re business folks. We’re giving birth to a number of female-voiced assistants and male-voiced instruction givers. It feels like there is a lot of opportunity and potential there, but also a lot of danger.
A lot. You’re taking one slice of it, voice. I’m totally on board with you. But let’s take AI in general. Amazing things are going to come with AI. Just take healthcare. Who’s going to be taking care of our elderly two generations from now? It’s going to be AI. But do you want all males in their early twenties and thirties creating the AI that’s going to take care of you when you’re older? I think you want a pretty generative conversation when you talk about who’s going to be doing that.
Even current health needs. I’m not picking on Apple at all, but just to come out with a health app that doesn’t track menstruation? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having menstruation for half my life, so far. It’s just such a blatant error, and it’s just an example of all the things we can leave out for women.
We need women to be a part of that. When you look in the labs at who’s working on AI, you can find one woman here, and one woman there. You’re not even finding three or four in labs together.
The other thing I know from work around the world is that women truly only get empowered when there’s a collective of them. You get one woman down in a village trying to break the system. She can’t do it at the village level unless she’s got women around her. It’s the power of the collective. Then she can go demand her rights.
You have one woman in an AI lab? She’s not going to be able to make the change that three or four can if it’s amongst 10 coders.
You and your husband pioneered a new model for philanthropy. What can you take from that model as you begin to approach a new problem?
Data. Data, data, data. Anywhere that you don’t have data, you need to have it. It needs to be transparent. It needs to be a public good, so that everybody sees the same data and is working off the same data set. We’re doing that in global health. Data in this area will make it transparent.
Let’s build a collective. Let’s get one place that we start to show the models of what works. This is what we learn in philanthropy. You show models; you put down some money; you take some risky bets; and then you get information. In our development role, governments then scale up [the things that work].
So you are most interested in looking at the education pipeline?
Yes. I’m also interested in looking at the business pieces of this too, like, what about venture funding for women? Not just women, but also minorities. We’re only talking about the women’s piece of this, but are you kidding? The diversity numbers for blacks and Latinos are terrible in these things.
There’s another piece that we haven’t spoken about, which is leave. When women and men become parents in this country, we don’t do enough to support them to stay in the workforce.
I’m starting to make investments behind the scenes on family leave. We have to have good family leave policies in this country. At the federal, state, and private-sector level. We just have to. At least in this political environment, the one good thing that’s happening right now is that it’s not anymore whether we should have it, it’s now how to have it.
After this presidential election is over, I look forward to a real policy coming forward. You’re starting to see more states doing it. I want to make sure that we accelerate what’s going on at the state level, too, and we figure out what are the very best policies. Not every state will implement it the same way, and that’s okay, but men and women should have it.
There shouldn’t be only maternal leave. There should be family leave, because if you’ve got a sick or elderly parent or you have a child, having the man and the woman take the time off helps.
What have we not covered that we should talk about while we’re together, Melinda?
For me, there are all these hidden inequities, these biases, that men and women have bias about women working, what women should do. But if we don’t look at those root inequities and we don’t talk about them and make them transparent, we won’t move forward as a society.
Update. We collected your opinions from the responses below to create a letter of advice for Melinda Gates:
[Melinda Gates Asked for Ideas to Help Women in Tech: Here They Are
Backchannel’s readers have some advice for philanthropy’s first ladybackchannel.com](https://backchannel.com/an-open-letter-to-melinda-gates-7c40d8696b63 "https://backchannel.com/an-open-letter-to-melinda-gates-7c40d8696b63")
