Homeroom with Sal & Melinda Gates - Tuesday, January 12

Hi everyone, Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome to the Homeroom live stream! Actually, I think this is the first of the year. Hopefully, everyone had a good New Year’s considering the circumstances and is enjoying 2021. Given the circumstances, we have a very exciting show today.

I think someone who needs really no introduction is Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and author of "Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World." So, start thinking of questions that you could put in on YouTube and Facebook. We'll try to get to as many of those questions as possible.

But before we jump into that conversation, I will give my standard announcements. A reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization that's funded through philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So, if you're in a position to do so, please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate. Donations at all levels really make a huge difference.

I also want to make a shout-out to several organizations that stepped up when they realized that the world was depending on Khan Academy even more during COVID. Special thanks to Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, and General Motors. We continue to need more help, so anything you can do is very much appreciated.

And last but not least, I want to remind everyone that you can get a version of this live stream in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts, at "Homeroom with Sal," the podcast. With that, I'm so excited to introduce Melinda Gates, author of "Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World," and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Melinda, great to see you!

Melinda: Hi Sal, thanks for having me!

Sal: Well, there's so much that I could talk about, and you cover a lot of this in your book. There's a lot of work that you've done beyond the book. Maybe a good place to start would be with the book. Why did you decide that now is a good time to write a book, and what are your hopes for it?

Melinda: Well, I wrote this book and introduced it in 2019, and now we're coming out just now with the paperback. I wrote it at the time because I had been lucky enough to travel the world because of the foundation. I met so many women who had really animated my life and called me to action. I felt if I could tell their stories, it might call the world to action.

When I wrote this book, I think we as a community thought we were on our way toward gender equality. Now, here we are in the middle of a pandemic in early 2021, and women have really been set back in the United States and all over the globe. So, we have a lot more work ahead of us.

Sal: What's been surprising is that when I saw the book and I started reading it, I expected to hear a lot of the stories of your travels, the work that you all have been doing with the foundation. There's definitely that, but what's been really interesting is that it's also a very personal book. You kind of thread in your own experience trying to balance the different pulls on your time from trying to be a great mother, trying to have a great career at the same time, and kind of relating that to a general theme of women around the world having all these things that they're trying to balance.

Melinda: Yes, I thought it was important to include my personal story. To begin with, you know I do live a life of extreme privilege now, but growing up, I grew up in a very middle-class family in the United States. I think no matter whether you're in a low-income country, middle-income, or high-income, women face a lot in their lives that we just don't talk about. I thought it was important to talk about my own journey and my own struggles with balancing being a mom, which I absolutely wanted to be and am, and a working woman.

I tried to then highlight how that also is similar for so many women around the globe who don't even have the resources that I have to get some extra support and help.

Sal: I want to talk to you about both of those, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of questions about that. But first, when we're talking about helping women around the world, obviously there's the pre-COVID context in which you wrote the book, and then what you're able to see both in the broader, industrializing world and in the industrialized world. What COVID stresses are putting on women? What do you see as the real challenges facing women that we really have to address?

Melinda: To me, the challenges are the barriers that hold women back in society that we so often don't talk about—harassment and abuse, whether at home or in the workplace. The other big barrier, quite frankly, is this child care work, this unpaid labor that women do in their homes every single day. No matter where you are in the world, women do more unpaid work than their husbands do, and that keeps them often from being fully in the workforce and being fully present.

Then there are many things we can do to accelerate women in key industries. We have to ensure we get money in their hands, accelerate them in finance, in the tech sector, in the United States, and in policy-making and political positions. Because until you have women with a seat at the table using their full voice and decision-making authority, we will never have sound policies that benefit all of society. Those are imperatives for us if we're going to really move forward as a world.

Sal: You know, there's a lot in that. There's the fairness argument, which is a very strong one. There's the argument you just made about the need for a diversity of viewpoints around the decision-making table, especially if it's going to affect people of different viewpoints. In your book, you referred to a study in Bangladesh, which is where my family originally comes from, where they were able to actually, to some degree, run an experiment where women were more in the driver's seat of things like family planning. What did that lead to?

Melinda: Thank you for that question, Sal, because I think so often we don't talk about family planning or contraceptives. Yet, when you look in the United States, what has allowed women to go to college and get a degree and work in the workforce, it's being able to decide when, whether, and how often to have children.

In Bangladesh, as you referenced, in the 1970s, there was the longest global health study that's ever been run with two different sets of villages. One set had full access to contraceptives; women were educated about their bodies, all types of methods of contraceptives were available, and they used them while the other villages did not have access.

What they found over this long study was that in the villages where contraceptives were readily available and used, the families were healthier, the children were healthier, the children were better educated, and the families overall were wealthier. That's because the moms and dads could space the births of their children and feed and educate each one of them before they chose to have another child. That makes a profound difference in terms of unlocking the cycle of poverty for a woman and her family.

Sal: You mention that, and it makes me reflect on my wife and my journey. My wife, who is more educated than I am, went to med school. For our first child, we essentially planned it out around her residency. That ability, which we take for granted today, is not something that's commonplace for most of human history. In many parts of the world, sadly, it's still not expected.

It's really when you're able to space it out that the family can have resources they can invest in their children. Are there other big things that you think folks should know about that are high-leverage points for empowering not just women but also the communities that they're part of?

Melinda: Certainly. Two things I would say: educating a girl—when a girl has access to a good education, she makes completely different decisions about her life. When she has access to those new ideas and that new thinking, she also usually delays getting married and having children. That has a profound effect not just at a community level, but at a regional level and at a country level.

It’s why finally, in the last 10 years, so many presidents and prime ministers show up at the UN and talk about girls' education—getting girls into school and keeping them in school all the way through at least secondary school. So that is a really important factor.

The other is getting economic means into a woman’s hands. All over the world, one thing we now have, of course, is phones. Even if you don’t have a smartphone, but you have access to an old plastic phone, there are governments all over the world—India, Bangladesh, many others, Tanzania, Kenya—where they're making sure that women and men can save a dollar a day, two dollars a day on their phone so they actually have a bank account.

When the school fees come due for the child, or there’s a health shock in the family, or they need to purchase food, the woman has money of her own that is not her husband’s money. That is vitally important because it empowers her in the family. She is often the one who decides who’s going to eat first, second, and third or who’s going to go to the medical facility.

A woman who has money in her hands can get out of an abusive situation, invest in a small business, and make different decisions for herself and her children. Money is power, and it makes a difference for women’s own power and influence.

Sal: It makes a ton of sense. You know, at least a natural question when I read some of the stats and studies on these various dimensions is, it seems like a no-brainer that more of the world should be focused on this; that they should be investing. I know there’s been a lot of progress over the last several decades, but it also makes me wonder why weren’t people already doing that?

You know, the role of why haven't governments been involved? Why is there such an emphasis on the philanthropic sector? Maybe take the other side—you mentioned in the book when you first met Hans Rosling, who was a famous data visualizer, how he was skeptical, saying something like “American billionaires are going to mess things up.” What do you and you hear that more and more in the public narrative of people saying, "Philanthropy sounds good, but we're not so sure," or "Maybe this is too much power in the hands of a few people." Where do you see that balance? What's the role of philanthropy and what's your sense of making people realize that there's actually a lot of value here?

Melinda: Let me start with the second question, which is philanthropy’s role. I think philanthropy does its best when it understands that it is part of an ecosystem. You need philanthropy, government, private sector, businesses, and civil society all working together to benefit the world and society.

Philanthropic money can do what some of the others can’t; it can take risks where there’s no market, where a business won’t enter, or where the government doesn’t want to take the risk with the citizens' money. It can try new things, it can further new ideas, and if those things prove out, then it’s up to government to fund them and spread those ideas.

To your first question: why was it a decade ago, 15 years ago, when I happened to be at the UN or other places with global leaders, and no one talked about girls? First of all, girls were not on the agenda. Women were only on the agenda when it came to their maternal health. Prime ministers and presidents didn’t talk about women and girls other than that. Why is that?

It’s because we run in a society where males run the top of society. They run the political bodies, they run quite often the social media platforms, they run the newspapers. You have to make sure that you actually make extra investments to help women rise up into those positions of power.

If you don’t have a diverse slate of people at the table, that is, in our own country, people of color, women, and men, then you don’t get a diverse representation of society. You make policy based on what you know, but if that comes from a group of just white men, they don’t see the full view of society that a woman or a person of color with their lived experience would have seen. Thus, you don’t build into society the places that will unlock opportunities for women and people of color.

That’s why I am such a big proponent of making sure we create pathways for women into key industries such as politics, finance, or tech because of how pervasive and influential those areas are in running our society and our globe.

Sal: I couldn't agree more. In full disclosure, many folks know your foundation has been one of the founding sponsors of Khan Academy, and I obviously have some biases here that I should disclose. Khan Academy would not exist without the philanthropic sector. Even when my friends were skeptical about why Khan Academy even exists—shouldn't it be for-profit or shouldn't it be government?—it’s exactly in that zone where it needs to move fast and innovate, but it needs to operate on values that market forces, which I'm normally a big fan of, might not lead to.

That's just a small example, but some of the work that you all have been doing with malaria, with polio, with things that shouldn’t be killing anyone but have killed thousands or millions over the last several decades—both you and Bill are very humble about how many millions of lives you have saved. It should arguably be part of government, but without the philanthropic sector there, I don't think these aren't vanity projects.

Melinda: Those are not vanity projects.

Sal: I don't think any of that would have happened. You know, one question—there are a lot of questions coming in on social media, and I'll get to some of them. I've been using my privilege to take all my questions, but this question is from YouTube from Chillax: “What do you think you have achieved by working and collaborating with women in different countries?”

I do wonder about that. You and Bill go on a lot of trips; you visit villages; you really are in places that many of us have never been to. You know, my family's from Bangladesh. I think you've gone into more of the real rural villages of Bangladesh than I or many members of my family have ever been to. What do you learn from those trips that you might not have appreciated before?

Melinda: I think it’s fundamental to travel and to listen and to learn. We could come in with our Western point of view of, “Oh, you need this for your child,” or “This is the way to do things because we do it that way in the U.S. or Europe,” when in fact, if you listen to the locals, they have very good reasons for doing what they do. They have seen more death and disability than we have, and they can tell you what might work or what the barriers are that hold them back.

You can come in with the very best vaccine or new tool, let’s say for malaria, but if the village elder who makes the decision won’t let that tool be taken up, it’s going to go nowhere. So for women, what I have learned is that you need to go in, sit down with them in their homes and where they gather—in the village market or on a local mat, talk with them, and then the men eventually let the men wander away back to the fields or to their business.

Then you hear the truth of women’s lives, and you hear what they’re up against, what lengths they will go to, how they take their meager means, and feed their children. You learn that women are incredibly resilient, and one of the things I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in or help lead is this effort on family planning because so many women have told me, “I’ve heard of those tools; we used to have them in my village. I don’t have them now, and I have six children. I cannot have a seventh. I cannot feed these children.”

So I've helped lead this family planning effort because there are 200 million women asking us for contraceptives. We need to educate women about contraceptives in their bodies, so they understand them, and if they do, make sure they have access to them so they can voluntarily decide if they want to use them and if and when to have children.

Sal: Where do you think this is going? You've talked about a lot of the good work that’s already happened, but it also paints a picture that there's a lot of important work that needs to be done. What do you see for yourself or, I would say, for the broader sector? What needs to be the priorities for the next five or ten years, and what is an outcome we can be hopeful about in ten years? Maybe one that we should be afraid of if we don't take action?

Melinda: Yes, well, I will have to be frank that this COVID-19 pandemic has set us back enormously in global health and global development. You know, where poverty was on the decline, we're now seeing poverty on the rise. Where we were making huge inroads on contraceptives, for instance, there are now going to be 15 million unintended pregnancies this year alone, we estimate, because of the lack of contraceptives.

So the global health community will have a lot of building back to do—to make sure that vaccination rates stay up and that children are fed and kept alive. But some of the things we can be hopeful about come from these new tools: the fact that so many people around the world have a cell phone in their hands. Information is power; money is power.

We can give them life-saving information on their phone, and we can start to hook them up in their local community with telemedicine—especially if the health services just aren’t there or aren’t functioning well, which is true in many countries around the world. So, I think these new digital tools give us opportunities as long as we get them out equitably into women’s hands, we teach women about the Internet, and we make sure they have access.

So it means we have to do special programming just for women so that they actually get these new tools. If there’s a new seed available that’s drought-resistant or pest-resistant against climate change, we have to go the extra mile to not just get it in the hands of men but to get it in the hands of women too so they can get a bigger yield and get more income off their farm because most women in the world work in the informal sector, and they are farmers.

Sal: You touched on that in that last statement. What do you see as the role—there's a role for policymakers, there's a role for philanthropy, there's a huge role for women obviously in this. What do you see as how do we change the culture or what's going on in men's minds? I'm curious about a lot of places we've been talking about where even things like family planning—you can't take for granted.

Melinda: Well, I think to change culture, you really have to start where people are, and you have to listen to them about why they have certain beliefs and why they do things the way they do them. Only over time, with a lot of trust and discussion, can you start to introduce new ideas. People have to decide for themselves if they want to take up those new ideas.

Yes, you can push down with top-down policy—for instance, a good child marriage law—but communities have to accept that and decide they’re not going to do child marriage again. Even in the United States, things like child marriage used to be acceptable before, in my mom's generation. We don’t expect, we don't say those are the norms today.

We spread things and ideas through our networks, and then we influence one another. For instance, today, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to find too many women smoking during pregnancy. Yet when Jackie Kennedy was the First Lady of the United States, there are pictures of her smoking. We came to learn that is not good for babies or moms.

But those ideas—the changes needed—required good policy, but the ideas had to spread. That's how you change hearts and minds, and it takes time, but it can be done.

Sal: And on that, you know, you've touched on this in your own personal life. I wanted some help with mine as well. You talk about this notion which is absolutely true: whether we're talking about a village in Bangladesh or a two-income professional family in Seattle or Silicon Valley, some of the issues around women disproportionately taking on much of the work at home, even when someone hypothetically is a rheumatologist.

My question is, do we just have unrealistic expectations on both men and women? Essentially, we want to be super parents, which could take 90% of our time. We want to be super workers, which take 90% of our time. If you have two people whose jobs take 90%, you're trying to have 270% with only 200% of time. I'm curious how you and Bill have navigated that.

Melinda: I think in all of our homes, we have to look at who does what, and we have to say, what are our values, and what do we want as a family and a society? I think sometimes, in the United States, we’ve gotten it a bit wrong where we value work so much. We need to be saying, wait a minute, in our homes, we all know we care about our families, but how do we balance society to make sure there are good child care options out there and a good child care infrastructure?

How do we, in our homes, have the tough conversations about why do we both—men and women, myself included—have gender normative ideas about who takes out the garbage, who does the dishes, or who gets to go to their computer first after dinner versus helping the kids with homework? We actually have to look at all those tasks and say, how do we redistribute them?

Are there times in each of our careers where maybe the woman's career goes first for a while, and the man helps take care of the kids a bit more at home? And maybe then there's a time where his career goes forward and she takes care of the kids more? There are ways to blend and balance this, but we do need better policymaking in the United States.

We need a paid family medical leave policy; we're the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have one. Only 20% of our workers get maternity leave, and that’s insane. We need to have good policy and we need to have honest conversations in our homes if we’re going to change things.

Sal: I couldn’t agree more, and I could talk for hours about this because it’s a fascinating subject. In the time we have left, Melinda, any parting thoughts? Especially to those who’ve been watching—we have students watching, we have parents, we have people of all ages—but I also think about it especially for the men, not to view some of these things we call them chores. There might be chores at home, but to actually, to your point, embrace some of these things.

Some of my best moments that I’ll never regret in my life are when I was able to help with, you know, giving my kids a bath. They’re a little older now, so that'd be awkward, but when I was able to give them a bath or clean the house or whatever else. What messages would you want everyone to take away, both from your book or just in general?

Melinda: I would say, you know, we need to look at all of our norms in society. I’ve met people in a remote village in Senegal; I’ve had men tell me who have taken on more chores or made normative changes in their families. I’ll eventually get them alone and say, well, why did you do that?

They said, because that work is hard; my wife was doing it, and she was tired. When she's happier, I’m happier, and my whole family is happier. We have a saying: happy wife, happy life. I think it’s true. If men and women are happier in their homes, our children are happier and more balanced, and we can go out and do what we want to do.

So what I want to say to people is it’s possible. We just have to really re-look at things and decide what it is that we want. What I know is that society is going to be better off when we have women taking their equal place to men, not just in their homes but at all places where decisions are made. We all need to work toward equality. In the United States, we’re 208 years away from equality. We sometimes think, oh, we’re 50 or 60. No, we’re 208 years away.

So we have to make these decisions in our homes if they're going to have ripple effects in our community and in our world. I know it’s possible. It sounds like you’re doing it and thinking about it in your own home, Sal, and that’s fabulous.

Sal: It's inspiring! It’s good to know that in some ways, it’s comforting to know that you and Bill deal with the same problems that we all are trying to navigate. I could talk for hours about this and your book, which is incredible. I really encourage people to take a look at it. It’s out in paperback today, and it discusses a lot of really interesting things that I think everyone needs to be informed about.

Melinda, thank you so much for the years of support for what we’re doing at Khan Academy and frankly for changing the lives of millions around the world. Thank you for setting an example with things like the Giving Pledge—a kind of new generation, a new type of philanthropy that I think is changing the world.

Melinda: Well, thanks for having me on your Homeroom. I wish you’d been in my homeroom when I was growing up. All the best to you.

Sal: Thank you so much! Thanks everyone for joining. That was a wonderful conversation. We could have spoken for hours more—so much in that. I really do encourage you all to take a look at "Moment of Lift." There’s a lot that I expected to see that I found very insightful about how to affect global health and empower women, but there are many personal stories about Melinda, her journeys, and her struggles, which I think are very relatable.

Also, I’ll let you all know we’re going to have another Homeroom live stream tomorrow with Jennifer Doudna, who is a 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner. So we're going to geek out hard tomorrow in chemistry—encourage you all to come! And actually, if you want, do a little bit of research ahead of time. I know a good website called Khan Academy to make sure your chemistry is up to snuff.

Look forward to that, and I'll see everyone tomorrow!