What I wish I’d known about gender equality

Last week, I shared an excerpt from our Annual Letter explaining why Bill and I decided to make global health a priority when we started our foundation 20 years ago.

What we didn’t realize at the time, however, is that to make progress on global health—and everything else we care about—we also needed to get much more intentional about addressing gender inequality.

In the excerpt below, you can read about my journey to becoming an advocate for women and girls—and how the women I met around the world called me to action.

       -  Melinda

Excerpt from our 2020 Annual Letter:

In addition to the foundation’s 20th anniversary, this year marks another milestone I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the 25th anniversary of the Beijing World Conference on Women. (If that name doesn’t ring a bell, you may know it as the event where Hillary Clinton famously declared that “Human rights are women's rights, and women’s rights are human rights.”)

I remember reading about the conference and feeling that the world had planted an important stake in the ground for women. But it took years before I recognized how gender equality would fit into my own work.

After Bill and I started the foundation, I began spending time with women in the world’s poorest places. I wrote a lot about those trips in my book, The Moment of Lift, because they changed everything for me.

I met a woman who asked me to take her newborn home with me because she couldn’t imagine how she could afford to take care of him. I met sex workers in Thailand who helped me understand that if I had been born in their place, I, too, would do whatever it took to feed my family. I met a community health volunteer in Ethiopia who told me she once spent the night in a hole in the ground rather than returning to her abusive husband—when she was ten years old.

Each one of these women represents millions more. And what makes their stories even harder to bear is the knowledge that, unless we take action, they are stories that are destined to repeat themselves. Because if there’s one thing the world has learned over these last 25 years, it’s that these problems are not going away on their own.

The data is unequivocal: No matter where in the world you are born, your life will be harder if you are born a girl.

No matter where in the world you are born, your life will be harder if you are born a girl.

In developing countries, the experiences of boys and girls start dramatically diverging in adolescence. The average girl in sub-Saharan Africa ends her education with two fewer years of schooling than the average boy. One in five girls is married before her 18th birthday, trapping her on the wrong side of a power imbalance even within her own home.

Meanwhile, in high-income countries, gender inequality tends to be most visible in the workplace. Even though women in the U.S. earn college and graduate degrees at higher rates than men, they tend to be concentrated in certain majors and are often channeled into less lucrative jobs. Men are 70 percent more likely to be executives than women of the same age. These numbers are even worse for women of color, who are doubly marginalized by the combined forces of sexism and racism.

The reason the pace of progress for women and girls has been so glacial is no mystery. It’s the direct result of the fact that—despite the valiant efforts of activists, advocates, and feminist movements—the world has refused to make gender equality a priority. Global leaders simply have not yet made the political and financial commitments necessary to drive real change.

When the world comes together to mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Conference, it will, I hope, do a lot to generate energy and attention around gender equality. But this time, we need to ensure that that energy and attention is converted into action.

To read more about what I think we need to do accelerate progress for women and girls, visit GatesLetter.com.