Melinda Gates is the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the United States. With more than $40 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation works on a dizzying array of issues, from eradicating polio to feeding the world to treating HIV to stopping climate change to reforming the US education system.
Gates has also been working, in recent years, on increasing diversity in the technology industry. “If you [only] have products created by white guys in their 20s, you’re gonna miss the mark,” she says.
I sat down with Gates at South by Southwest for an interview that covered a lot of ground. We talked, among other things, about bioterrorism, climate change, the culture of Silicon Valley, the Damore memo about gender and technology, the future of food, the problems money can and can’t solve, what makes America culturally distinct, and more. You can listen to the whole interview on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Ezra Klein
You made a comment about the need for diversity in technology that I wanted to hear you expand on. You said, “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 20s and 30s creating the AI that’s gonna take care of you when you’re older?”
What would happen if that AI was created by all males in their 20s and 30s?
Melinda Gates
I don’t think they’d fully understand the needs of older people. You have to spend time in that community to understand what their needs are. I think you would miss a big part of the empathy gene.
The way you treat a young child versus an 18-year-old, 22-year-old, 30-year-old, versus an elderly person, is pretty different. You use a lot of empathy when you’re trying to bring a child up and teach them, and it’s tricky because you have to use a lot of positivity even when what you’re trying to do is correct behavior. But [it’s] the same thing with an elderly person. It’s a horrible thing when you start to lose a little bit of your sight, or you can’t drive anymore, and that was your rite of passage when you were younger. I think if you have these products that are created by white guys in their 20s, you’re just gonna miss the mark on both empathy and the actual needs of the elderly and what they’re facing.
Ezra Klein
The counterargument you hear to this is “Well, what we want to do, above all, is hire the best people.” That feels to me like the real point of friction right now, this question of whether diversity is something people are prioritizing because they’re politically correct or because it is something they need to build the best products.
Melinda Gates
They’re leaving opportunities off the table. There’s good research now that shows your products are better, you’re gonna reach more markets, if you have diversity at the table. Think of the way women use certain tools online versus men. They’re often very, very different.
Here’s a great example. There was an idea to connect people to nannies and babysitters that came from a female founder. She ran it across Sand Hill Road [where the big venture capital firms are], and nobody understood it. Here’s another one that’s actually been extraordinarily successful that Ben Horowitz has invested in: hair weaves for black women. It’s an enormous market. When that founder went and ran it across Sand Hill Road, the guys totally didn’t get it. Ben Horowitz did, and he invested in it. Guess where he grew up? He went to Berkeley, has an African-American wife.
When you think about the changing demographics we’re seeing in this nation, when you think about the workforce today and dual-income families now, it’s completely different than when I grew up back in the 1960s. By 2044, what we call minorities today in our country, when you add them all up, they will be the majority. If you don’t have diversity at the table, there’s no chance you’re gonna see it. You’re just not. If you’re a VC and you’re about deal flow, you’re missing all kind of deals, because the deals you’re investing in are what you’ve known before.
Ezra Klein
One of the things you’ve spoken about is that when you went to school in the 1980s, women got about 37 percent of computer science degrees and 37 percent of law degrees. Women get now 47 percent of the law degrees, but in computer science, it’s gone down to 18 percent. What do you think is behind that?
Melinda Gates
I dug through the data, and nobody actually knows the answer, but the thesis is that, when I was a kid, all the games were pretty gender-neutral. I played Pong, I played Breakout, I played the adventure games, but when gaming became very combative, and it became about guns and fighting, girls weren’t interested in them, and women weren’t interested in them.
The people who were interested in creating them were men, so more men poured in, more games came out like that, and women went, “Oh, so many men in this industry, not interested.” We know that women, even today, who make it through computer science undergraduate degrees and then go to work for one of the big companies — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft — they will tell you that if they join a team that’s all male, they’re just not as comfortable. They will seek out the teams that have two or three women because it makes an enormous difference in how they feel and how they perform.
I see this, and I have data from all over the world. We see this on the village level with women. When 10 women get together, they start to get their voice. They start to demand their rights; they start to band together to save or to get loans. We see it at the CEO and board level in the United States. You put one woman on a board, nothing is going to change. She assimilates. You put two or three women on a board, they start asking the hard questions. “Why is it like this? Why aren’t we creating more of this? What is going on? What’s the latest culture survey? What does the data say?”
Ezra Klein
I’d like you to unpack that gaming idea for me, because I haven’t heard this before. I think the counterargument somebody would naturally come up with is, “Well, is that because men just like video games more?”
There’s this idea that men are object-oriented and women are people-oriented, and that what you’re seeing is a reflection of intrinsic differences within the genders that lead to this divergence. Because law, medicine, these were also exclusionary cultures. The culture of surgeons can be a tough culture to break into. Yet there’s some critical mass that happened there.
Melinda Gate
Even if you look at US surgeons or law partners, women are just now breaking that glass ceiling, and that’s because we have this preponderance [of] women coming up. To your question, what causes that?
We have to look at pathways in. If you are Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, you’re hiring from the Ivy Leagues. You’re hiring white guys from a particular kind of school, because that’s what you know and that’s what you see.
There are more pathways into biology at all kinds of universities. You could go to Harvard Medical School even if you went to the University of Georgia, University of Florida.
We have to make sure that colleges craft that first course so it’s welcoming to women. In math, or in the sciences and in computer science, we know that women don’t like just theoretical problems, but if you open up that first computer science course and it has real-world problems, more women both sign up and stay in computer science afterward.
Ezra Klein
What did you make of the Jamie Damore memo at Google?
Melinda Gates
I don’t think it was accurate at all. Will we ever get to 50/50 women in computer science and men? Maybe not. But you might get to 40 percent. If we get that far, we will be better off than we are, but we can’t be where we are today. That just makes no sense.
Ezra Klein
There’s a feeling among many folks in the technology industry that there is a stultifying political correctness descending. Y Combinator’s Sam Altman has written about this. People feel that you used to be able to bat around almost any idea, and that was part of what made the American technology sector so great, but now, as people move into this space and try to diversify it, there is a boundary on the conversation that is dangerous. What is your response when you hear that?
Melinda Gates
That’s called an old boys’ network. That’s a club. I don’t like clubs. I mean, come on. You take the walls down, you democratize something, it’s better for everybody.
I am not about political correctness. I am not about window dressing. None of those things are gonna work. I’m about, how do we take the tools we have and create leverage?
I say, “Okay, less than 2 percent of VC funding goes to women; 0.2 percent of VC funding goes to women of color. Is there a problem there? Yes.” What I’m doing is not just using my voice; I’m moving my money, and I want a return on my money. I’m not doing this for social impact. I want a return, but we’re overindexing for women and people of color, and let’s see what happens.
What the world could look like in 2030
Ezra Klein
Is there a self-interested case for American foreign aid?
Melinda Gates
Absolutely. If you want peace and security in the world, you don’t want a bomb showing up on our doorstep, or bioterrorism event, you don’t want Ebola on our doorstep; you want to create markets and more jobs, yeah. Our voice in the world holds an outsized impact. We need to step up and recognize that and take responsibility for that, and then take the right actions.
When I see what’s going on in Nairobi, Kenya — I was just there in January, and their own innovations hubs, they’re creating products that not only serve Kenyans, that serve 10 other countries in Africa. When you look at the billionaires who are just starting to come out in Africa, it’s because they’ve created markets. If we want markets, let’s not just think about the United States; let’s create markets, and make the world better for other people, and sell our products out there.
Ezra Klein
I think the American conversation about what is possible has become narrowed over time. You go back 50 years and the organizing precept was that America’s vision of liberal democracy could defeat communism. I don’t think when we imagine our role in the world now that there’s a shared vision of what we are trying to help create.
Here’s my question for you, and you can answer it however you hear it. What world is possible in 2030? How will we know if we have succeeded?
Melinda Gates
Childhood mortality’s been cut in half since 1990. Cut in half! That is a phenomenal number. It’s going to get cut in half again by 2030. Maternal deaths, they can get cut substantially.
Another metric is stunting. Stunting is when you’re not the right height for your age. If you go back to the statistics in London closer to the turn of the century, people were much, much shorter because they didn’t have all the right nutrition. Today in the United States, you see very little stunting.
We have metrics from all over the world where stunting is still happening. You get out of your car in Ethiopia and you don’t even have to get the data. You can see the stunting. These kids just aren’t nearly as tall as they should be.
One of the things we’re working on as a foundation is drought-resistant seeds and flood-resistant seeds, because who’s gonna be most affected by climate change? It’s the poor farmers around the world, and when you’re out in the fields, they’ll talk to you about the rains coming later, coming less often, and, when they come, flooding.
I think infant mortality, maternal mortality, can the world feed itself, and are we getting down the emissions that lead up to climate change? Are we seeing a good downward trajectory on that? I think those are four of the big metrics.
Ezra Klein
When I hear people make the case for pessimism, that case often resolves down to climate change. Why, given the trends on climate change, are you optimistic?
Melinda Gates
That’s really gonna come down to, “Do we get inventions that we can invent our way out of some of those things?” Warren Buffett always likes to remind us — he’s 87 at this point, he’s a huge font of wisdom — that back in the time when it was the horse and buggy and we started having cities, you would’ve thought we were all gonna drown in shit, and we invented our way out of that problem. When I think about what’s coming with autonomous vehicles and what’s already starting to be on the road, think about if those were all electric cars!
Ezra Klein
I struggle with this. I tend to have a lot of faith, when I look back over the past couple of hundred years, that we will innovate our way out of problems. But sometimes I think, “Is that just the short span of time in which I’ve been alive? Is that letting hope stand in for a plan?” How do you know when betting on innovation is a bet that is realistic versus just a way to talk yourself out of being afraid of the problem?
Melinda Gates
Bill and I have been at this work now, in the foundation, for 17 years, and I see the numbers in child mortality. I see it when I go out to the developing world. I see the science inside the foundation. I sat in a meeting on Thursday where these scientists have hit on something where it looks like, in probably seven years, we won’t have to fertilize plants anymore. For the developing world, where most people in Africa are still subsistence farmers, holy smokes.
If I told you what I see that’s coming in HIV or malaria — malaria’s been around since the time of the Egyptians, okay? It’s been with us forever, and it’s a parasitic disease, it’s very hard. We actually have a chance of getting rid of malaria in my lifetime.
Ezra Klein
Are you talking here about the CRISPR gene drive approach? When you say what you’re seeing coming, what are you seeing coming? How are we going to destroy malaria?
Melinda Gates
We’re modifying mosquitoes so they will, in one or two generations, not carry malaria. The females are all the ones that carry malaria. Males don’t carry malaria. We can modify the males who mate with the females to become sterile, and over a couple generations, there are not enough males to mate with females, and so you crash the population.
Where the next breakthroughs will come from
Ezra Klein
Speaking of gene editing, there are days when I wonder if this period in history will not be remembered for Donald Trump, or whatever else is going on, but that this will be remembered as the period in which we figured out how to take control of the genome and take control of our own evolution, for better or maybe for worse. Is that me having too much Gattaca in the back of my head?
Melinda Gates
No. What we’re gonna be able to do with the genome, and then with precision medicine and artificial intelligence, we’re on the tip of the cusp of where we might go. That’s why the ethics pieces in this are deeply important. Bill and I often have this kind of fun debate of, “If you were entering any field now and you had your choice of going into any field, what field would you go in?” He and I both would go into the cross between biology and computer science. What is gonna happen in those fields, we’re only beginning.
Ezra Klein
Tell me a bit about that.
Melinda Gates
Take the spread of disease around the world. People go work in a forest somewhere, we couldn’t figure out why the malaria kept coming back in the village after we’d eliminated it, well there’s a forest kind of malaria. Now we can do modeling of the mosquitoes and how they move around, what distance they go. We can look at GPS data to see how people are moving around, and then you can apply very specific tools; bed nets in a certain area of malaria, medicines in a certain area. Eventually, hopefully, a vaccine; eventually you’ll be able to release mosquitoes, genetically modified mosquitoes.
We haven’t even done the machine learning piece on that yet. Then you cross that with the biology of what we’re learning about the human body. What we don’t know yet about our guts is mind-blowing. What we are just learning about the gut microbiome, and, to be frank, but the vaginal microbiome.
We don’t know why certain people in the world uptake HIV quicker, why certain women contract it more from men. It’s not just about the population and the amount of sex that’s happening; it actually has something to do with their vaginal microbiome, we’ve just recently learned.
No one has ever really done a full-scale study of breast milk. One of the things that we just hit on that we’re learning is the human body sends messages to the child’s immune system through breast milk. Who knew that?
Ezra Klein
Let me ask you about a place where some of these trends converge. As we pull people and countries out of poverty, they buy more cars, they eat a lot more meat. How do you keep rising prosperity globally, which hopefully we will continue to see more of, from becoming a runaway climate problem?
Melinda Gates
Okay, well, the biggest problem is if you get overpopulation. Bill and I had this false assumption. We thought that as more children survive, a parent is going to have more of them. Luckily, the converse is true. When parents see that two of their children will survive in the developing world and grow up to be healthy, they naturally bring down the number of children they have.
I think if we bring the population down, we make it voluntary, then, to be honest, it’s not going to matter what car you sell them. In 10 years, you’re gonna be selling them a car that doesn’t have a motor, right? You’re gonna be selling them an electric car. One of the things Bill’s been very vocal about is he’s working with some VC companies on meatless meat. It’s all plant-based. Eventually, I think, we will get taste in meat down to a point where people will eat a plant-based meat and feel like, “Hey, this is just as good as the meat I’m eating.”
Ezra Klein
What are the biggest global risks in the next 10 years? What are the things that you are afraid of?
Melinda Gates
A bioterrorism event. Definitely. Most definitely.
Ezra Klein
Why is that at the top of your list?
Melinda Gates
A bioterrorist event could spread so quickly, and we are so unprepared for it. So unprepared.
Ezra Klein
Even now?
Melinda Gates
Yeah. Think about how global the US is. If you had something that could spread fast, and you brought it into New York, and especially if it’s what we call latent — you don’t see whatever the disease was for even 24 or 48 hours — think of the number of people that leave New York every day and go all over the world. We’re an interconnected world.
Ezra Klein
That is a genuinely scary answer to that question.
Melinda Gates
That’s why I don’t like to answer it, and I don’t talk about it very much.
America is less distinct than we think
Ezra Klein
Over the course of your travels, what have you come to believe is culturally distinct about America?
Melinda Gates
I don’t really think the US is as culturally distinct as we think we are. Honestly. I think we think more of ourselves than we should. When I travel around the world, the thing that has struck me time and time and time again is how similar we are.
I meet people of all income levels in countries all over the world — we are so the same. We care about many of the same things. We care about our children, we care about our safety, we care about having some economic opportunity so that we can rise to our fullest potential, as can our kids. It’s the same anywhere I go.
I if ask a man or a woman farmer who lives a mile and a half out on a dirt road, and I say to them, “Okay, what are your hopes and dreams for your family?” they always talk about education for their kids, always. I think, “God, that’s the same thing my parents wanted for me, it’s the same thing I want for my kids.”
We think we’re so unique, and we’re not. To be frank, we’re lucky. We’re lucky. If you grew up in this country, to have the road infrastructure that we have, to have our health system — which is imperfect, but for the most part, most people have access to decent health here — we’re lucky.
Ezra Klein
I want to ask you about a way in which your experience has been unique. You are one of the richest human beings who has ever lived, and that happened at a certain moment in your life. As you’ve gone through that experience, what problems in your life have you found that money can solve, and what problems can it not solve?
Melinda Gates
I grew up in a very middle-income family in Dallas, Texas. I have three siblings. It was very difficult for my parents to put us through college. We could see that, but they were insistent that all four of us would go to college and they would figure out a way to pay for it, which is a very powerful message from your parents.
As I’ve come into this situation that I can’t believe I find myself in, the thing that I always come back to is it’s about your values. Values, values, values. Everything that I am about is about trying to live out my values and trying to teach my kids our values, and to question, do we have the right values? Are we living up to those? I don’t think that changes. Low, middle, or high income, if you have good values and you live and teach those, you’re gonna get off track here and there, your kids are gonna get off track here and there, but you’re gonna be basically okay.
One thing when you’re wealthy is you have lots of choices in life about who will serve up what to you, how you spend your time. You see some of those kids are actually very unhealthy, because the parents aren’t home, they’re busy out doing other things. I really try to make sure our kids have a diverse set of friends, and we’re lucky enough to be able to travel. They have gotten to go on safari in Kenya, but boy have they spent a lot of time seeing poverty in Kenya, and South Africa, and Tanzania, because to me, it’s important they see the whole world, not this little just pinprick of where they live in Seattle.
Ezra Klein
What are three books you’ve read over the years that you would recommend that others read?
Melinda Gates
I would say Sapiens, for sure. Love that book. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, definitely changed some of my views about the world. And then the other one I would say — my husband and I often read books and then pass them to each other, and this one is currently his favorite book, so I’m reading it, and I’m loving it, but I’m only a quarter way through: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.