DAVOS, Switzerland – Melinda Gates has traveled the world with her husband, meeting with its rich and powerful and visiting its poorest in remote African villages. She and her husband share top-billing at the world’s richest foundation, but Bill Gates has always dominated the spotlight – until this year.
Taking the stage for the first time, Melinda Gates addressed health, development and women’s issues before a VIP audience last week at the World Economic Forum.
Sitting in a comfortable chair beside her husband for an informal conversation over breakfast Saturday, Melinda Gates told about 200 invited guests that she chose a more public role so people would realize that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is definitely a his-and-hers operation.
She was managing several Microsoft units when she met the software powerhouse founder and chairman in 1987 at a media event for the company in New York. The Dallas native with a master’s degree in business administration from Duke married Gates on New Year’s Day 1994 when the Harvard dropout from Seattle was already the world’s richest man. They quickly began a family.
Melinda Gates said she decided to keep a low profile because she wanted to be with her children, who are still young – Jennifer, 10, Rory, 7, and Phoebe, 4. “We’re both very, very engaged parents,” she said.
After Phoebe celebrated her first birthday, Melinda Gates said, “I felt like, OK, now’s the time.
“I was seeing so much in the developing world. But what was happening because I wasn’t out talking about what I was doing, or what we were doing, is people started naturally to think, `Well, this is Bill’s foundation.’ And that couldn’t have been further from the truth,” Melinda Gates said.
“And both of us felt that it was very important that people understood that this is a joint effort – the two of us are absolutely moving it forward as a couple. And so getting that out, and letting people know that we both cared about it is one reason,” she said.
In 2005, she started speaking about the work of the foundation – which has a $32 billion endowment, including $1.6 billion from billionaire U.S. investment wizard Warren Buffett – according to the foundation’s Web site.
Gates said she was especially moved by the burden that falls on women in the developing world, who are called on to deal not only with the daily struggle of feeding their families but also with sickness, death and other emergencies.
“I felt like I was seeing too much not to speak out … to give voice to the voiceless,” she said.
In a speech Thursday, she said that despite programs to fight poverty and disease in the developing world, “millions of children still die every year of diseases we can prevent easily and cheaply. And more than 1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, suffer from chronic hunger, and don’t have enough clean water to cook with or drink.”
“Bill and I started our foundation,” she said, “because we believe that people living in extreme poverty and dying of preventable diseases deserve the same chance we all had: the chance to make the most of their lives.”
