Melinda Gates Tops the List

THE JOURNAL REPORT: WOMEN TO WATCH

Melinda Gates Tops the List
By MARILYN CHASE
November 20, 2006; Page R3

One hot Sunday in October, the world's richest philanthropists, Bill and Melinda Gates, stood in a cassava field outside Abuja, Nigeria. They asked growers pulling up the tuber how to improve this bitter root that fills many African bellies but lacks vitamins and contains a natural form of cyanide.

After the technical questions came the moment of truth: A nearby table was laden with cassava flour, cassava bread and cassava cookies. Ms. Gates sampled the goods, then tactfully asked the baker, "How do you think it tastes?"
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As a colleague says of Ms. Gates: "She will happily roll up her sleeves to understand the real-world applications."

Going the distance to assess global health needs is one reason the 42-year-old Ms. Gates has emerged as a powerful force in the new philanthropy. As co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she logs air miles like a shuttle diplomat, touring project sites from Botswana to Bangladesh. Her mix of grace and gravitas has tempered the brash image of her tech-tycoon husband, and has eased acceptance of their ambitious agenda for ending health inequities.

The foundation -- whose $31.9 billion endowment is growing with a $30 billion pledge from investor Warren Buffett -- funds an array of efforts strategically focused on AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and childhood diseases abroad, along with education and homelessness in the U.S. Skeptics who initially were turned off by Mr. Gates's reputation for hubris in amassing his software fortune have warmed to Ms. Gates and her humility in helping him give it away.
MELINDA GATES

Co-Founder
THE BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION

Striding onstage by her husband's side at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August, Ms. Gates acknowledged, "Bill and I are relative newcomers" to the war on an epidemic that many scientists have spent their lives fighting. While other speakers had been jeered by activists, the Gateses received a standing ovation.

Bucking stereotypes, the couple had decided as they worked on their AIDS Conference speeches that Ms. Gates would focus on science and Mr. Gates on ways to help women, who make up most new HIV cases world-wide. Ms. Gates presented the foundation's scientific agenda for AIDS prevention, funding research to develop a long-term vaccine, and short-term tools like a prevention pill and microbicide gels that women can use if their partner rejects condoms. Mr. Gates, meanwhile, issued a feminist-sounding credo. "No matter where she lives, who she is, or what she does, a woman should never need a man's permission to save her own life," he said, promoting female-controlled protection methods.

"It was music to [people's] ears," says Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition, a New York-based nonprofit. But Ms. Germain was disappointed the Gateses didn't enlarge their $125 million funding for microbicides on the spot -- proof that big money raises even bigger expectations. (Rather than bankrolling projects in full, the foundation prefers to draw partners into networks of shared support.)

Smart Questions

Scientific skeptics long wondered whether the couple would flex their fiscal muscles wisely. But as the foundation tapped the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for seasoned staffers, and began rolling out grants with their help, it has started winning support.

Ms. Gates has been key to this conversion by studying the science, seeking expert counsel and respecting it.

"She asks smart questions," says David Heymann, a WHO veteran of drives to end smallpox and polio, who adds, "She's so humble in her interactions with others."

She's modest in dress as well, wearing a blue work shirt and slacks or long skirts. It's an image crafted to reflect the gravity of her mission.

Her persona has played a pivotal role in India, where the Gateses have invested $258 million to prevent HIV's spread, setting up -- among other things -- community centers with medical care for prostitutes, and a chain of clinics for long-haul truck drivers, another group seen as being highly at risk. At first, the Gateses' philanthropy provoked government sensitivity and press skepticism. New Delhi bristled at Mr. Gates's quoting of high AIDS projections by the Central Intelligence Agency. Newspapers asked whether the Microsoft Corp. founder's charity was sincere or a marketing ploy.

Enter Ms. Gates, who, on a well-planned visit to the country, soothed critics and earned new credibility for the foundation's efforts. Donning a marigold garland and clasping hands with women in Calcutta's red-light district, she praised their work to prevent AIDS and protect their children. She told the Times of India she was born middle-class to parents who found it a stretch to send her to college. She added that she tells her own children about such visits because "they need to know the problems of the world and their own responsibility in addressing them."

A Dallas native and daughter of an engineer and homemaker, Melinda Ann French attended the Ursuline Academy, a Catholic girls school whose motto, "Serviam," means "I will serve." She has credited its teacher Susan Bauer with encouraging her gift for math. The school declined to comment, as do other insiders, who respect a moat of privacy around her life.

At Duke University, she completed an accelerated B.A. and M.B.A. program in five years, earning a double major in economics and computer science and serving two internships at International Business Machines Corp. One of her teachers at the graduate school of business, Prof. Richard Burton, says he was correcting exams for his management class one day when the answers on one student's test leapt out.

"This one exam had better answers than my own," he says, "so I started using Melinda's paper." He should have hired her, he adds.

Ms. Gates, who earned her M.B.A. in 1987, fared well with a different suitor. Snapped up by Microsoft, she rose in the ranks of information-product managers, crisscrossing the country to speak to Microsoft user groups. She was a product manager on Word, then managed a diverse portfolio of businesses, including Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia Encarta and its travel service Expedia, which it later spun off.

"Melinda was a big-picture thinker, strategic and thoughtful," says Lisa Brummel, Microsoft's senior vice president of human resources. In a corporate culture that bristled with autonomous problem solvers, she also pushed for more collaborative decision making.

"We were smart people, [used to] working on our own," says Ms. Brummel. "Melinda brought people together to solve a problem." Did this tactic make her popular? "It made her respected," Ms. Brummel says, adding that it took time for co-workers to appreciate her style.

"We were not natural collaborators at the time," she says. "We've gotten better as a company in this. But originally that was a unique strength of Melinda's."

Bonding Over Puzzles

Later, a different sort of collaboration began. After she met Mr. Gates at an out-of-town corporate function, the two began dating. It was a time when office romance was rampant in the company, along with more than a few "Microsoft marriages."

But this was an atypical Cinderella story, in which the bride had more academic degrees than her fiancé (who left Harvard to launch his business). She is also a bigger jock. A runner and kayaker, she has climbed Washington's 14,411-foot Mount Rainier. Mr. Gates favors bridge and golf. The two bonded over puzzles.

Intellectually, she gave as good as she got. "Melinda is very smart," Mr. Gates says in an email. "For fun she brought some math type quizzes on an early trip we took and held her own quite well. When we do puzzles, she is much better than I am at parts of it." He says they began discussing giving away his wealth before they exchanged vows.

In the now-famous prologue to their 1994 Lanai wedding, a letter from Mr. Gates's mother, Mary, then terminally ill with cancer, urged her son's fiancée to share the fruits of their good fortune. Mr. Gates also took his fiancée not to Tiffany, but to Omaha, Neb., to choose an engagement ring at a jewelry store run by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. under its chairman and CEO, Mr. Buffett.

Kindred Spirit

Mr. Buffett -- besides sharing bridge and burgers with Bill -- also introduced Melinda to his friend, Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham. Associates of the Gateses credit the late Mrs. Graham and her autobiography -- detailing the rise of a reserved woman to lead a media giant -- with inspiring Ms. Gates to cultivate her own public voice thoughtfully.

Ms. Gates, who worked at Microsoft for nine years until after the birth of her first child in 1996, declined to be interviewed for this article. A foundation spokeswoman says the summer's storm of publicity following the Buffett gift raised concerns that spotlighting her could eclipse the foundation's work. Such wariness isn't surprising, given media and Web gossip about all things Gates from their courtship to their closet size.

Nor does Ms. Gates, born a Roman Catholic, publicly discuss her faith. Her speech in Toronto, though, challenged anyone who would put dogma ahead of AIDS prevention. "In the fight against AIDS, condoms save lives," she said. "If you oppose the distribution of condoms, something is more important to you than saving lives."

She also chided politicians who shrink from offering AIDS prevention to prostitutes. "Think about saving the life of a faithful mother of four whose husband visits sex workers," she said. "If you're turning your back on sex workers, you're turning your back on the mother of four."

In the Gateses' joint appearances this year, as well as in interviews, Mr. Gates showcases Ms. Gates as his full partner at the foundation, crediting both her strategic guidance in shaping its programs, and her social skills in connecting with people who need its services.

"Even before we were married, we talked about the challenge of giving wealth back to society in a way that would make a difference," he says in an email. "Our early discussions focused us on how the breakthrough advances that are doing so much for people who are well off could benefit everyone." Providing the poor with tools like conventional vaccines has expanded into a high-tech research agenda.

During a July 2006 trip to Durban, South Africa, to visit a microbicide test site, Ms. Gates broached issues such as how women liked the intimate gels. "Melinda was better at asking about, uh, some aspects," Mr. Gates laughed at a joint appearance with former President Clinton in Toronto.

"Melinda bonds with some constituencies more naturally than I do," Mr. Gates continues in his email. "We both love to visit sites to see what is going on," he writes, adding that she currently travels more than he can. When one of them travels solo, Mr. Gates writes, he or she shares "what surprised us [as] soon as we get a chance." If she reads a book he hasn't had time for, she's "fantastic" at conveying lessons learned.

Gates Foundation Chief Executive Patty Stonesifer, who has known Ms. Gates for 20 years, says "her gift" is seeing the everyday impact of science -- whether it be in Microsoft technical reviews, or in "smearing gels" on her hand to get a feel for how microbicide formulas perform.

Allan Golston, the foundation's president of U.S. programs, adds that Ms. Gates also pushed a forward-looking focus at Sound Families, the foundation's program for helping Seattle's homeless with housing and counseling. Mr. Golston says she challenged the program to be more strategic, and in response the group extended its focus to at-risk families, trying to help them from becoming homeless in the first place.

Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt, who served with Ms. Gates on the Duke Board of Trustees, says she was "astute" but approachable. "She has none of the habits of rich people," Mr. Reinhardt says.

Ms. Gates has relinquished her post as a Duke trustee and other outside directorships to focus on family and foundation. She remains on the Washington Post Co. board, where Mr. Buffett is also a director.

'Focused' and 'Thoughtful'

Washington Post Co. Chairman and CEO Donald Graham, the son of Mrs. Graham, says he prizes Ms. Gates's directorship because she's "focused, thoughtful, and knows tons about technology."

"I'm embarrassed by how often I call her asking her advice, and how available she is," Mr. Graham says in an interview.

Partnering with Melinda, Mr. Gates says in an email, gives the foundation work a synergy that is "greater than the sum of the parts." The two email each other constantly, he from his office at Microsoft, she from her office at home.

That home, a sprawling waterfront compound in Medina, Wash., is the domain where she is mother to Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe, three Gates heirs who share their legacy with millions whom they may never meet. Like Mr. Buffett, the couple elected not to pass a dynastic fortune to their children. As Ms. Gates told the Times of India, she's rearing her children to know that "they should give back."

--Ms. Chase is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau.

Write to Marilyn Chase at marilyn.chase@wsj.com