The Moment of Lift

by Melinda Gates

  Their claims might have been more convincing in past centuries, but male dominance has lost its disguises. We see what’s happening. Some parts of the Church come from God, and some parts come from man—and the part of the Church that excludes women comes from man.

  One of the weightiest moral questions facing male-dominated religions today is how long they will keep clinging to male dominance and claiming it’s the will of God.

  Encouraging the voices of women of faith is not an explicit part of my philanthropic work. But the voice of male-dominant religion is such a cause of harm—and the voice of progressive religious leaders is such a force for good—that I have to honor the women who are challenging the male monopoly and are amplifying female voices to help shape the faith.

  But women can’t do it alone. Every successful effort to bring in outsiders has always had help from insider activists who do the work of reform from within. Women need male allies. They know this, and so in every religion where men have unequal influence, women are raising questions that make men uneasy. Who are the men who will stand with the women? And who are the men who will keep quiet out of obedience to rules they know are wrong?

  The number of Catholic priests I’ve talked to who support ordaining women, combined with the institutional Church’s absolute opposition to women priests, convinces me that morally, in some cases, institutions are less than the sum of their parts.

  It may strike you as a little odd that a chapter that opens with gender in farming would close with a discussion of religion, but we have a duty to trace women’s disempowerment up the stream to its source. Women around the world who are trying to reshape their faith, who are wresting the interpretation of scripture from the grip of a male monopoly, are doing some of the most heroic work for social justice and economic opportunity in the world today. They’re on the edge of a new frontier. These women and their male allies, especially the men working for reform inside ancient institutions, deserve our gratitude and our respect.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Creating a New Culture

  Women in the Workplace

  Much of my work is focused on helping women and families get out of poverty because that’s where I feel I can make the biggest impact. I also want all women to be able to develop our talents, contribute our gifts, and flourish. Gender equality benefits all women, no matter our level of education, privilege, or accomplishment, in the home or the workplace.

  Women in the workplace is a vast topic. So much has been said and written on it that it’s impossible to know it all, and yet most of us know the issues personally because we’ve lived them. I’m sharing here my experiences in a workplace and industry that I know well, drawing some lessons that apply broadly, hoping to sketch the outlines of the workplace of the future where women will be able to flourish as ourselves without sacrificing our personalities or personal goals. I’m giving special emphasis to my time at Microsoft because the stories I will tell you from those days formed many of my views on the workplace—and also because the tech industry has disproportionate power to shape the future.

  * * *

  One of the most influential figures in my professional life was a woman I met only once. During spring break of my last year at Duke, I flew home to Dallas to pay a visit to IBM, where I had worked several summers during college and grad school. I had an appointment with the woman I’d be working for if I took IBM’s offer of a full-time job, which I expected to do.

  The woman greeted me warmly, offered me a seat in her office, and, after a few minutes of courteous conversation, asked me if I was ready to accept her offer. I was a bit more nervous than I expected when I said, “Actually, I have one more place I plan to interview with, this small software company in Seattle.” She asked if I would mind telling her which one, and I said, “Microsoft.” I began to tell her that I still expected to take IBM’s offer, but she cut me off and said, “If you get a job offer from Microsoft, you have to take it.”

  I was stunned. This woman had spent her career at IBM, so I had to ask, “What makes you say that?” She said, “The chance for advancement will be incredible there. IBM’s a great company, but Microsoft’s going to grow like mad. If you have the talent I think you have, the chance you will have there to advance as a woman will be meteoric. If I were you and they made me an offer, I would take it.”

  This was a pivotal moment for me, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a passionate advocate for women in tech—I want to pay forward the generosity of my mentors and role models.

  When I flew into Seattle for my interviews, I was still pretty sure I would go back and work at IBM. Then I met some of the people at Microsoft. One of the more memorable guys greeted me with drumsticks in his hands and drummed his way through our whole interview—on his desk, on the walls, all over his office. It wasn’t something he did with just women; it was something he just did. I had to raise my voice to be heard, but he was listening. I thought it was kind of funny, actually, and eccentric. You can get away with eccentric if you’re great at what you do, and it seemed everyone I met was great.

  I loved the pulse, the electricity, of the place. Everyone was so passionate about what they were doing, and when they talked about their projects, I had a feeling I was seeing the future. I had written a lot of code in college, and I loved it, but this was a much higher plane for me. I was like a girl playing youth soccer meeting the US Women’s World Cup Team. I loved hearing them talk about how people were using their products, what they hoped to do next, how they were changing the world.

  At the end of the day, I called my parents and said, “My gosh, if this company offers me a job, I will have to take it. There’s just no way I can’t take it.”

  Then I went off to spring break with friends in California, and my parents went off to the library to look up this Microsoft company. My mom and dad were excited about the idea that I might come back home to Dallas and work, but they always said they wanted me to go where adventure and opportunity led me. That’s the path they took. I want to take a moment here to tell you about them, how they met, and how I learned from them to follow my dreams.

  My parents both grew up in New Orleans. My dad’s father owned a machine shop, which in the 1940s was focused on making machine parts for the war effort. The shop’s profits were the sole income for the family, and my grandparents didn’t have a dime to send my dad to college. Luckily, though, my dad attended a Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers, and a Brother there became his mentor and kept telling him, “You have to go to college.” The word of a Brother carried weight in my dad’s house. So the fall after my dad graduated from high school, his parents put him on a train to Georgia Tech in Atlanta with his newspaper route earnings and a jar of peanut butter.

  Once in college, my dad split his time between studying in Atlanta and working in Dallas, where he got a job with an aerospace company. That’s how he earned the money to put himself through college, and that’s how he eventually ended up working at LTV Aerospace on the Apollo program.

  When my dad came home to New Orleans for Christmas after his first quarter at Georgia Tech, two Dominican nuns decided he needed a date during the holidays—Sister Mary Magdalen Lopinto, who was a mentor of my dad’s and had given him jobs during high school, and Sister Mary Anne McSweeney, who was my mom’s aunt. (She was very significant in my life. I called her Auntie growing up. She taught me how to read, and I remember trying on her habit once when I was little!) The sisters were best friends, and they were amused that my father had recently had two girlfriends who both left him for the convent. My great-aunt, Sister Mary Anne, told her friend about my mom, who for a while had attended a juniorate high school as a candidate for the sisterhood. They decided she was the one for my dad.

  Sister Mary Magdalen called my dad and said, “You don’t have any girlfriends anymore. You sent them both off to the convent. So we’re going to send you to this house on South Genois Street, and you will meet a girl, Elaine, who’s already been to the
nunnery and come out, so you won’t lose her the way you lost the others.”

  So my dad went to South Genois Street and met my mom.

  She said, “They called me and asked me if I would be willing to go out with this guy whom I’d never met, and I thought, Well, he can’t be too bad if nuns are suggesting that I date him.”

  A few days later they went out for a date on The President, a big multi-deck boat with a stern paddlewheel that cruised up and down the Mississippi River. It must have gone well. They dated for five years while my dad was in college. Then my dad got a scholarship to do graduate work in mechanical engineering at Stanford, so they got married and drove out to California, where my mom, who never went to college, supported them both with her income as an administrator for a company in Menlo Park. When they moved back to Dallas, my mom was pregnant with my sister, Susan, their first child, and right away my dad was working on the Apollo program and NASA was racing to land a man on the moon. My mom said that she remembers him working almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Some days he would go to work and come home three days later, getting brief naps on his office couch.

  That left absolutely everything to my mom. She ran the house. She raised four kids. And when my parents started a residential real estate investment business so they could afford to pay for us kids to go to any college we could get into, my mom ran the business during the day. My dad contributed hugely in the evenings and on weekends, no question, but my mom’s to-do list every single day when she was working on the business was just unreal. How she juggled it all, I have no idea. (But I’ve noticed now, looking back, that for all my mom did to raise four kids and run the house, it’s when my parents ran their real estate business together that they gained more equality in their marriage.)

  My mom and dad knew from their own lives the pull of opportunity, and they had done their research at the library and were ready to support my move to Seattle when the Microsoft recruiter called my home and reached my mom. Mom, who is all of about five feet, with her sweet southern accent, said, inappropriately, “Oh, please can’t you tell me if you’re going to give Melinda a job offer?” And the recruiter said, “Well, I’m really not supposed to do that.” So she put the charm on and asked him again, and he caved and said, “Well, in fact, we are going to make her an offer.” So Mom jotted down the details on a small notepad (which she saved and I still have), then started calling me in California. As soon as she reached me with the message, I called Microsoft and accepted.

  I was thrilled!

  A few months later, I flew to Seattle for an orientation with my new employer. I was in Microsoft’s first class of MBAs, and the company decided to have the ten of us come out for a visit and figure out which group we should join at the start. Our first session was in the boardroom—the biggest conference room they had; that’s how small the company was back then, about 1 percent of the size it is today. As I looked around the table, I saw only men. That didn’t seem weird; majoring in computer science in college got me used to being in rooms full of men. But then the vice president of applications marketing came in to talk, and as he was presenting, the guy sitting next to me, the same young age I was and fresh out of Stanford Business School, got in an all-out debate with this VP. This wasn’t just a spirited exchange; it was a brash, escalating face-off, almost a brawl, and I was thinking, Wow, is this how you have to be to do well here?!

  It took me a few years to get my answer.

  * * *

  When I started work, I realized instantly that my mentor at IBM had it right. I got opportunities at Microsoft there was no possible way I would have gotten anywhere else. Three weeks into my start, I’m 22 years old flying to New York for a meeting and I’m running the meeting. I’d never been to New York. I’d never even hailed a cab!

  It was the same for all of us at Microsoft. We laughed about it later, but it was scary. One friend told me his manager came in and said, “I want you to figure out higher ed,” and he said, “What do you mean, figure out higher ed?” and the manager said, “What do you mean, what do I mean?” It was not a place for people who needed a lot of guidance. We were climbing the mountain without a map, and we were building the mountain without instructions. And we were all madly excited about what we could help people do with software.

  Our customers were just as excited as we were, so the opportunities kept coming. I started out as product manager for Microsoft Word, then became group product manager for a series of products. Then marketing manager for a larger set of products. (“Products,” by the way, was the in-house term for software programs.) Then group marketing manager. Then I wanted to focus on the product, not just the marketing, so I became product unit manager for Microsoft Publisher. That involved managing teams doing the testing, development, and all the things that go into creating a product. And guess what—when you’re that young and get that much opportunity, you get the opportunity to make mistakes, too, and I took full advantage of that! I was the group product unit manager for Microsoft Bob. (You don’t remember Microsoft Bob?!) We hoped it would make Windows more user-friendly. It was a flop. The tech critics killed it. We’d already announced the product and knew we faced some headwinds before our first public demo. So I went onstage for that event wearing a T-shirt that said MICROSOFT BOB on the front and had a bright red bull’s-eye on the back. They hit the target. I got pounded. But you just can’t put a value on what you learn when you stand up as the face of a project that failed. (There was a joke in the company that you didn’t get promoted until you had your first big failure. Not entirely true, but useful solace in difficult times.)

  Mercifully, most of my other failures weren’t as public as this one, or as painful. But all those failures were useful. In one sequence of missteps, I made the mistake of expensing something I wasn’t allowed to expense. Yikes! Not something that a good Catholic girl who sits in the front row and gets good grades ever wants to do—especially when she’s the new girl in a male-dominated company. Not just my manager but my manager’s manager came down on me. I tried to explain that I had asked an admin about the procedure. No one cared. No time for that.

  Soon afterward, I was in a meeting with the same manager, and he was throwing me questions about how we should price our new product, and I didn’t know a particular number—our cost of goods sold, which is a key number that a product manager should know to the penny. It’s not just that I didn’t know that number. That wasn’t the big issue. The big issue was that I didn’t understand my customers well enough to know what they would be willing to pay. I learned that, from that point on, I needed to know the key numbers—and I’d darned well better know where they came from and why they’re important.

  After that meeting, I thought, Wow, I may not survive. This is the top manager in my area. I’m one of the few women, I messed up on my expense report, and I misstepped on this. I remember asking a few people, “Can I ever regain this guy’s trust?” It took me a while, but I rebuilt my relationship with him, and I ended up better off than if I had expensed things properly and knew the number he’d asked for. Nothing sharpens my focus like a mistake.

  All these experiences and opportunities made me see why the IBM manager urged me to take the job. It was exhilarating and challenging, and I was learning a ton, but something about it wasn’t right for me. A year and a half into the job, I started thinking about quitting.

  It wasn’t the work or the opportunities; they were awesome. It was the culture. It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point they were making and every piece of data they were debating. It was as if every meeting, no matter how casual, was a dress rehearsal for the strategy review with Bill. If you didn’t argue strenuously, then either you didn’t know your numbers or you weren’t smart or you weren’t passionate. You had to prove you were strong, and this is how you did it. We didn’t thank each other. We didn’t compliment each other. As soon as something was done, we took little time to
celebrate. Even when one of the best managers left the company, he just sent out an email saying he was leaving. There was no party, no group good-bye. It was weird. Just a speed bump as we raced through our day. That was the standard of how you had to be to succeed there—and it felt pervasive in the company. I could do it. I did do it. But it was draining, and I was getting tired of the rough-and-tumble. Maybe I should go work for McKinsey, I thought. McKinsey is a top management consulting firm known for driving its people hard—but not compared to what I was living at the time. I had interviewed with them before accepting the job at Microsoft, and they had called me a few times to check in on me and ask me if I liked where I was. So I nursed that escape fantasy for months, but I couldn’t make myself do it because I really loved what I was doing at Microsoft. I loved building products, I loved staying ahead of the curve, I loved knowing what users needed even before they did—because we saw where tech was going and we were taking it there.

  The truth was that I loved the mission and vision of Microsoft, so I said to myself, “Maybe, before I leave this amazing place, I should see if I can find a way to do all the things that are part of the culture—stand up for myself, know the facts, have a spirited debate—but do it in my own style.” From the beginning, instead of being myself, I had been acting in the style of men I perceived were doing well in the company. So the question came to me like an epiphany: Could I stay at the company and be myself? Still be tough and strong, but also say what I think and be open about who I am—admitting my mistakes and weaknesses instead of pretending to be fearless and flawless, and above all finding others who wanted to work the way I did? I told myself, “You’re not the only woman in this company, and you can’t be the only person trying on a false personality to fit in.” So I looked for women and men who were having the same trouble with the culture that I was.