Latest Melinda Gates Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• When I studied computer science at Duke University in the first half of the 1980s, I had professors who treated women differently than men. I kind of got used to it. At Microsoft, I had to use my elbows and make sure I spoke up at the table, but it was an incredibly meritocratic place. Outside, in the industry, I would feel the sexism. I'd walk into a room and until I proved my worth, everyone would assume that the guy presenting with me had credibility and I didn't.

  Melinda Gates

  Men, Guy, Elbows

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view.

  Melinda Gates

  Views, People, Outsiders

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Abortion has become a very politicised issue that I think countries have to work out themselves. In a lot of countries, people can't even yet agree on what their laws should be.

  Melinda Gates

  Country, Thinking, Law

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• If I really believe all lives have equal value, and if I use contraceptives, which I do, and if I'm counselling my son and my two daughters to use them, how am I not serving the women who don't have access to the contraceptives they need?

  Melinda Gates

  Daughter, Believe, Son

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• When I look at 225 million women who want contraceptives, and then I look at the 52 million unintended pregnancies that could be avoided by addressing this unmet need, where can we have the biggest impact with our voice, our dollars, our partners? It's on contraceptives. I would rather address the problem upstream.

  Melinda Gates

  Pregnancy, Voice, Impact

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I've travelled extensively in the last 16 years - to slums in Bangladesh, to townships in South Africa, to all kinds of places in India, etc. When I would go and talk to villagers about something like vaccines, if I stayed long enough, the women would bring the conversation around and say: "What about this family planning tool? We can't keep having the number of children we're having."

  Melinda Gates

  Children, Years, Vaccines

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.

  Melinda Gates

  Husband, Hands, Agriculture

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family's well-being - as much as 10 times more.

  Melinda Gates

  Men, Earning, Different

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• If you don't invest in the woman, empower her, give her the things she needs to lift her family up, you're just not going to make the progress that you want to make. But if you put her at the centre, you can change a lot for that family, and it has ripple effects through the economy.

  Melinda Gates

  Giving, Empowering, Progress

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Women are the centre of the family. It's the woman who decides what's eaten in the house, when to have the kids vaccinated; everything that has to do with the children's health revolves around her.

  Melinda Gates

  Children, Kids, House

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Childbearing, I mean, if there's no place to go to deliver your baby, then you're the one that's delivering in those unhealthy circumstances. Or if you can't get access to family planning, your chances of surviving and being able to bring your kids up if they come one right after the other, that locks you into a cycle of poverty.

  Melinda Gates

  Baby, Mean, Kids

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• If you can't go to secondary school, the boys get to go and the girls don't, you're locked into a cycle of poverty, because you don't have a chance.

  Melinda Gates

  Girl, School, Boys

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• Sanitation issues in the developing world affect women more than they affect men.

  Melinda Gates

  Men, Issues, World

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• If you ask, who has the chance to move into the city and get a good job out in the developing world? It's a man. Who's left to care for the kids back at home? The woman is.

  Melinda Gates

  Jobs, Moving, Home

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• Poverty disproportionately affects women around the world.

  Melinda Gates

  World, Around The World, Poverty

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• If you can't travel to the developing world, look at helping to fund a woman with a small loan and follow her. Learn her story. Learn about the difference that you're making.

  Melinda Gates

  Differences, Looks, Stories

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• I am Catholic, I was raised Catholic, I am a practicing Catholic. But I say we need to agree to disagree. We have a shared mission around poverty, and I focus on that, because we do a lot with the Catholic Church around poverty alleviation. I'm always looking for: what is the common thread? What do we care about? What do we believe in? We believe in women around the world. We believe in all lives have equal value.

  Melinda Gates

  Believe, Common Threads, Focus

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• Today is International Women's Day, and there's a fantastic set of pieces running by an organization called ONE called "Poverty Is Sexist." It's a great way to quickly learn about what's actually going on for women in poverty around the world, and then do something about it.

  Melinda Gates

  Running, Organization, Pieces

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• Now we just really need to do the work, which we're doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

  Melinda Gates

  Needs, Contraceptives

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• In the United States, there's definitely some controversy about birth control in general, and I think we needed to split the debate and have people realize that we actually agree as a country about contraceptives. Over 93 percent of American women say they use contraceptives, and they feel very good about it.

  Melinda Gates

  Country, Thinking, People

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• Despite the debunking, you have a small group in the last five years that hasn't wanted to vaccinate their children, for instance, for measles. Then, all of sudden, we got an outbreak of measles and kids were starting to die from measles.

  Melinda Gates

  Children, Kids, Years

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• All of a sudden people in the United States start to realize that vaccines make a difference. The controversy and the myth that's there, we're always trying to bust through that. So when I see a disease outbreak, I say to myself, "OK, that'll get people realizing how lucky we are to have vaccines."

  Melinda Gates

  Vaccines, Always Trying, Differences

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• In different places you run into myths around vaccination or around family planning. In the United States, one of the myths that existed for a long time, that has been completely debunked, was that autism was linked to a vaccine.

  Melinda Gates

  Running, Vaccines, Long

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child's health.

  Melinda Gates

  Children, Vaccines, Space

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

• Even in decision-making, we work in self-help groups. That is women coming together in small groups of 10 to sometimes 15 women, where they start to get education about their rights, about clean water and sanitation, about how to have a healthy birth. You can bring in all kinds of education to them that way.

  Melinda Gates

  Rights, Self, Water

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.