Junior League Quarterly Meeting

April 19, 2011

Prepared remarks by William H. Gates Sr., Co-chair

Thank you, Colleen.

It’s a pleasure to be here tonight to address this delightful and influential group of citizens.

In fact, the women of the Junior League are so delightful and so influential that I consider myself fortunate to have been invited.

Tonight is an induction night for many of you, so I realize this power of the Junior League may be something you are still learning and developing yourselves. In my case, this is a view that has been shaped by experience spanning more than 40 years with many Junior League members.
 
One such long-time Junior Leaguer and a friend is Colleen Willoughby, who I am honored to be joined by today. Past-President of the organization in 1974-1975, Colleen has long recognized that our best chance of dealing with civic problems is to empower women to get involved. This is something she demonstrated in co-founding CityClub of Seattle with seven other women to get Seattleites engaged and informed so we can make good decisions about our community’s future. It is also something she did in founding the Washington Women’s Foundation in 1995 as an innovative approach for more women to get involved in philanthropy. By pooling their funds and their brainpower, the women involved in this foundation are making a bigger, smarter impact in the community. Her model is catching on, and similar foundations are now popping up in cities across the United States, as well as around the world. Since I have the chance, I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you, Colleen.

Another name familiar to many of you is Anne Farrell, Past-President of the Junior League from 1972-1973. For many years, Anne has served the community in various leadership capacities. She was on the board of Washington Mutual Savings Bank from 1984 to 2003, as well as President and CEO of The Seattle Foundation from 1980 to 1984, where she led significant growth in the foundation’s endowment and offered some of the country’s very first donor advised funds. These funds allow individual philanthropists a meaningful way to contribute to the community, and I can proudly say that many people—including yours truly—make good use of them today.

A third and final example is the one I know best – my first wife Mary Maxwell Gates. Also a Past-President of the Junior League from 1966 to 1967, Mary was a force of nature. She was my partner, and she modeled to all of our children that there is nothing that women can't achieve. 

Civic engagement was Mary’s passion. In addition to the Junior League, her devotion to the United Way is something she’ll always be remembered for. Mary was so dedicated and effective that she was elected the first female president of King County’s United Way. Her leadership there was so impressive that she was soon invited to the national board, and became the first woman to chair their executive committee.
 
But that’s only a partial picture of her accomplishments. What I don’t talk about as often is Mary’s business savvy. In 1975, Governor Daniel Evans appointed Mary to the board of regents at the University of Washington, our alma mater, where she served until 1993. It was Mary who led the effort in the mid 1980s to divest the University’s investments in South Africa to protest apartheid—when that country still practiced legal segregation.

Mary was the first woman to be appointed to the board of directors for The First Interstate Bank of Washington, and she served on the boards of the telephone company and a major insurance company.

In the boardrooms, Mary was constantly pushing the group to think more strategically and to be even more responsive to the needs of the community.

Then at home, she pushed our children to do the same. I remember one day at the dinner table Mary was discussing a recent United Way allocation meeting; my son Bill interrupted saying:

“Mom, let’s look at this strategically—what needs aren’t being met? What other problems contribute to this problem? Who’s trying to meet them? What results are they getting? How do you measure that?”

To everyone around the world who has asked me what it takes to raise a successful son like Bill Gates, my first response is “Make sure he can learn from a strong woman.”

I share these stories in part as examples of Junior League women who have undoubtedly shaped my life, as well as the community and society in which we live. There are many of you here tonight that have done and will do the same.

But these individual stories also speak to something more fundamental – that is how the world has changed over the last several decades to deal with one of the most egregious forms of discrimination – that against women.

As we consider the many fundamental problems in the world society such as health, industry and education we recognize that among them there is the basic need to empower women.  In degrading women the world has lost an indispensable quality.

Along with the civil rights movement in our own country, the march toward gender equality is perhaps the most prominent example of the role of thoughtful citizenship in changing society for the better.  When I was in high school, women were unlikely to own a car, rarely went to college, and were unable to vote. Now, women are equally likely to own a car, are outpacing men in college completion, and we got a chance to elect a woman vice-president of the United States. I never imagined I’d see that.

In many cases it took legal action to give women the opportunity to prove themselves—to prove that their engagement in public life would benefit everyone. But prove it they have.

The three women who I described perfectly illustrate that point. These women took advantage of every opportunity that they had—opportunities that weren’t always obvious, that they had to really fight for. By setting examples, they opened up more and more opportunities for other women to follow in their footsteps.

It is an added benefit to have an influential organization like the Junior League supporting this mission – to develop the potential of women and girls, and thereby improve the community through  effective action and leadership. From my perspective as a husband, father, lawyer, and Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the equation at the heart of your organization is beyond question. Empowering women is the best thing we can do to improve our communities. Empowered women really do make thriving societies.

However, I now have a sense that people in the United States take for granted that women can do anything. What many of us don’t realize is that the majority of women in the world are still virtually powerless. The revolution that happened here, that women like you all spearheaded, hasn’t yet covered the globe.

Around the world, women are denied the opportunity to reach their full potential. They’re not given the chance to go to school, or to make decisions about their own health, or to earn enough to support their families. It's wrong, and of course, the irony is that by degrading women, men lose out too.

Empowering women in the developing world is not only morally right, it is strategically the best way to address global inequities. Let me share a couple examples of how that could play out.

One thing I learned when I started working with my son and daughter-in-law at their foundation is that in developing countries, three quarters of people depend on small, family farms for their livelihood. For many of these farmers, their yields are very small. They can work from dawn until dusk and barely grow enough to feed their families, let alone have any left over to sell, which is often their only chance of earning money to pay for basic things like clothes and medicine. The best thing that we can do to help give these farmers a chance to lift their families out of poverty is to help them improve their yields—grow more, higher-quality crops that are nutritious and will fetch a better price.

What we learned only after starting this work is that the majority of these farmers— in some countries over 60 percent—are women. It’s the women that do the back-breaking work like planting the seeds, fetching water for the crops, and pounding and grinding the seed to make flour to cook. This is on top of caring for their children—preparing their meals, nursing them back to health when they get sick, and saving pennies to send them to school.

Yet  of all of the services that are given to farmers in the developing world to improve their harvest—things like access to quality land and seeds, and training on new farming techniques—only five percent go to women. For example, in many communities in West Africa, the extension workers that provide farmers with these services are men. Due to cultural reasons a married woman in these communities can’t be seen speaking 1 on 1 with a man who isn’t her husband, so the male extension workers only talk to the men, and these women’s husbands don’t always pass on the information or technology even though women could apply them.

Because of these inequities, worldwide, women farmers produce up to twenty percent less on their land than their male counterparts. This is not because they are less capable farmers, but because they do not have the same access to those key services and resources like better farming techniques and improved seed.
 
This “gender gap” has massive implications. By simply giving women farmers access to those services and supplies that men already receive, they could grow enough food to lift over 100 million people out of poverty. And now at the foundation, we specifically look for a role for women in every grant that we make for agriculture.

Another thing we can do to help poor women is give them the information and the tools they need to plan their families. Last month, my daughter-in-law Melinda was in Washington DC celebrating the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. In her remarks she reflected on a conversation she had with a group of women on a recent trip to Korogocho, a slum outside of Nairobi. They were talking about their health and the health of their children, and one woman said, “I want to bring every good thing to one child before I have another.”

Imagine, for one minute, what it would be like to raise a child in Korogocho, knowing that you might not be able to earn enough to feed your son next week; that the chances that he will die are higher than the chances that -he’ll be left-handed. That really puts in perspective what it means to want “every good thing” for your child before having another.

Access to voluntary family planning is a woman’s right. It’s a right that women in the developed world have come to take for granted—and a good argument can be made that without that right we wouldn’t have seen the incredible progress in gender equality that we have seen in the United States and other developed countries since 1960 when “the pill” was first approved by the FDA.

When women and men can make important decisions about their family—how many children to have and at what age to have them—they gain the power to shape their future. The ability to plan helps women, their families, and their communities become happier, safer, and more prosperous.

Right now, it is estimated that 215 million women in the world want to use contraceptives but don’t have that option.

This year, 150,000 women will die from a pregnancy-related cause.

640,000 babies born to these women will die in their first month.

Simply by meeting the unmet need for family planning we could reduce maternal mortality by up to 40 percent, and infant mortality by 20 percent. This would take a huge step toward giving women the power to control their own destinies.

So why am I talking to you today about these issues?

Well, although I revel in reflecting on the achievements of the women’s movement, we must acknowledge that there is still huge room for growth, and some of the greatest inequities are left to be addressed in the developing world. 

We are making headway against these inequities and they can be resolved. Most importantly, the work you’re doing—empowering women and girls—is a crucial step in making progress.

There is not one person who could fix all of the world's problems. The average person, or even above average people like Colleen, Anne, and Mary, cannot, by themselves, address these big, societal problems.

So what makes organizations like the Junior League so special is that they're the best instruments we have for channeling people’s caring. I have an optimistic view of human nature. For the most part, I believe people are good, that we want to help our neighbors. I believe people want to be good citizens. When they see a problem, they want to fix it. What they need is a way to express their citizenship so that it makes the biggest possible difference in the world around them. You've heard what just three women were able to accomplish by finding the right channel—by trying something that might not have been done before—that they might have been told they couldn’t do.

The Junior League is beyond a doubt one of the great civic organizations of our society. Many of you here tonight deserve to be recognized for what you’ve done to improve our society. All of you deserve to be recognized for what you will do to shape our future.

For tonight’s inductees, I know that taking that step can be scary. You might not know how to relate to a child whose been raised in foster care, or how to advocate for a girl who has been sold into slavery. But be brave. You are powerful. You have the example of the women before you to guide you, and the support of everyone in this room to help you along the way. 

So thank you for being here, and for the commitment you’ve made. Together you will be a factor in making this a better world.