Melinda French Gates Quotes

It’s not okay for women to cry at work, but it’s okay for men to YELL at work. Which is the more mature emotional response?”)

To fight poverty, we have to see and study the barriers and figure out if they’re cultural, or social, or economic, or geographic, or political, and then go around them or through them so the poor aren’t cut off from benefits others enjoy.

The best way to fight back is to speak up—to say openly the very thing that others stigmatize. It’s a direct attack on the self-censorship that stigma needs to survive.

I came away with so much respect for the people I saw because I knew their daily reality would ruin me.

stigma is always an effort to suppress someone’s voice. It forces people to hide in shame.

As they see it, their culture doesn’t hold people back; it holds people together. In their eyes, pursuing excellence can look like disowning your people.

senators heaped doubt on her statistics about mothers dying and downplayed the significance of the mothers’ deaths, saying that more men die at work, so women shouldn’t complain.

As women gain rights, families flourish, and so do societies. That connection is built on a simple truth: Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone.

What extreme poverty really means is that no matter how hard you work, you’re trapped. You can’t get out. Your efforts barely matter. You’ve been left behind by those who could lift you up.

That’s what it means to be poor. They’re on the margins. They’re not getting the benefit of what human beings know how to do for each other. So we have to invent a way of getting it to them.

Can you take actions in conflict with a teaching of the Church and still be part of the Church?” That depends, I was told, on whether you are true to your conscience, and whether your conscience is informed by the Church.

Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That’s how we gain a common base of knowledge. When people can’t agree, it’s often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared experience. If you feel what others feel, you’re more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand one another. Then you can move to the honest and respectful exchange of ideas that is the mark of a successful partnership. That’s the source of progress.

That was Hans’s deepest witness of extreme poverty. It wasn’t living on a dollar a day. It was taking days to get to the hospital when you’re dying. It was respecting a doctor not for saving a life but for returning a dead body to the village.

In 2011, defying most expert predictions, India became polio free. It was one of the greatest accomplishments in global health, and India did it with an army of more than 2 million vaccinators who traversed the entire country to find and vaccinate every child.

The more I saw our work in the field, the more I realized that delivery needs to shape strategy. The challenge of delivery reveals the causes of poverty. You learn why people are poor. You don’t have to guess what the barriers are. As soon as you try to deliver help, you run into them.

When any community pushes any group out, especially its women, it’s creating a crisis that can only be reversed by bringing the outsiders back in. This is the core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill—including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.

We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins.

their cell phones. They are trained to ask very personal questions: “When is the last time you had sexual intercourse? Do you use contraceptives? What kind? How many times have you given birth?” Most of the time, the women they interview are eager to answer. There’s something empowering about being asked. It sends a message that your life matters. The resident enumerators learn a lot about the lives

The process of changing from a male-dominated culture to a culture of gender equality must be supported by a majority of community members, including powerful men who come to understand that sharing power with women allows them to achieve goals they couldn’t achieve if they relied on their power alone. That itself serves as the greatest safeguard against any overbearing bossiness from outsiders. The change comes not from outside but from inside—and through the most subversive action possible: community members talking about actions that are commonly accepted, rarely discussed, and often considered taboo.

There will never be a system that captures everything, so there will never be a substitute for hearing women’s stories.

Sometimes all that's needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down.