A Conversation About Gender Equality with Melinda Gates

This is an excerpt from an article originally posted on Medium.

In a scheduled appearance at the Harvard Business Review’s live recording of the podcast “Ideacast” yesterday with Alison Beard, Melinda Gates brought in a standing-room only crowd of people to Neuehouse in New York City during a busy United Nations General Assembly week with satellite events including the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers 2019, Concordia Summit, and Bloomberg’s Global Business Forum to name a few.

The topic of the afternoon is gender equality. In her article for the Harvard Business Review’s 7-part “Women, Power, and Influence” series, Gates optimistically points out that “Gender Equality is Within Our Reach.” In 2010, the United States crossed the 50% threshold where women became the majority of the American workforce. However, the inequalities have remained the same and have followed women to new places where one gap closes and another gap persists.

In her work with the Gates Foundation and travels visiting people across the globe, she and her equal partner and husband Bill Gates have had numerous conversations with women. One of the insights that she noted is the topic of birth control in the developing world versus the developed world. Before women in the developing world ask for contraceptives in their homes, they ask for clean water. In societies where families have multiple children, mothers have all known at least one person who has died giving childbirth and a child who has died after childbirth. With such low life expectancy statistics, having multiple children ensures that at least of their children lives to adulthood. Something most people in the developed world where vaccines and clean water are plentiful and accessible. Contraceptives in the developed world allow women to return to the workforce, but perhaps is not necessarily a deterrent for women in the developed world.

As Melinda Gates wrote in the HBR article, “Across all aspects of American life, it is most often men who set policy, allocated resources, lead companies, shape markets, and determine whose stories get told. Meanwhile, what gains have been made typically haven’t extended to all women.” In the workforce, there are three barriers to women in their professional careers:

1. Bias, some unconscious and some conscious.

2. Prejudice. Gates’ strategy is to dismantle barriers.

3. Harassment.

At the current rate, according to the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap report, the United States is still 208 years away from achieving gender equality, compared with Canada’s projected 51-year timeline and the United Kingdom’s 74-year timeline to close the gender gaps.

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About Cindy Chin

Cindy Chin is an entrepreneur, venture strategist, and cultural ambassador of the arts and sciences. As CEO of CLC Advisors, LLC, she is an advisor and board member to founding startup teams, a subject matter expert in frontier technologies, opportunity scout for VC and LP partners, a global strategic thought leader, and a sought-after speaker.

She is also a NASA Datanaut, an open data innovation program to promote data science, coding, and gender diversity operating within the Office of the CIO at NASA Headquarters. She is a Co-Founder of Women on the Block, an organization created by blockchain enthusiasts to promote empowerment of women to ensure diversity and inclusion in technology, an Ambassador for the d.Pulse Conference,a mentor in the Google Launchpad Mentor Program, Stanford University’s Technology Entrepreneurship and undergrad programs, and a member of the faculty of the Startup Executive Academy of Silicon Castles in Salzburg, Austria. She was the former artificial intelligence and machine learning program curator for the Digility Conference and Expo in Cologne, Germany, advisor to Women in Blockchain International, and a former management consultant at McKinsey & Company, Inc. and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

She was named as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s “50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs in 2018” along with leaders including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, General Motor’s CEO Mary Barra, celebrity chef and founder of World Central Kitchen José Andrés, “Crazy Rich Asians” author Kevin Kwan, Chance the Rapper, Academy Award winning actress and founder of Hello Sunshine’s Reese Witherspoon, and IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty.

About CLC Advisors

CLC Advisors is a firm of trusted advisors and subject matter experts in frontier technologies (AI, blockchain, ioT, mobility, and big data) and entrepreneurship focusing on development and execution strategies to build and incubate values-based business ventures, innovations, initiatives, and forward exponential technologies to future societies and smART cities. We specialize in building active global entrepreneurship ecosystems, smart cities, social impact and sustainability. By leveraging public-private sector partnerships for maximum social impact and sustainability, we help build great companies by defining strategies for building multidisciplinary ecosystems, accelerators, outreach, and innovation phases of ventures, alternative revenue generation and sustainability. We work with global businesses, government institutions and organizations in both the private, public, and social sectors. By pairing great talent where gender parity and diversity are critical factors for consideration and the access to capital needed to scale on a global and planetary level, we are dedicated to finding solutions for business models to expand into the growing arenas of impact investing, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and venture capital. CLC Advisors is committed to focusing on large-scale problems and issues of not just the world’s problems, but the integral survival of the planet and humanity. www.clcadvisors.com