Melinda Gates knows what it’s like to enter a room with her husband, Bill, and have the eyes and the conversation shift to him.
That used to happen routinely early on in the 53-year-old Dallas native’s role as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But in recent years, she’s taken on a more visible, commanding role looking at global health issues and gender equality.
So the slights happen far less often these days — usually with a first meeting of an older leader of a male-dominated country who doesn’t understand that she isn’t anyone’s ampersand.
She and Bill are better at making that point intentional, Melinda says over coffee at Sous le Pont in the Harwood District on Tuesday morning.
“We want to make it clear to people that we both run this place,” Melinda says. “It didn’t occur to me when we started out that role modeling would be so important. But we’re actually role modeling right now. I see that.”
Reflection and role modeling are where Melinda Gates is these days — realizing that the lessons she’s learned over the years about workplace success and personal fulfillment can impact the world.
In the past, she was so reticent about making her personal journey the center of attention that not that many people realize she was born and raised in Dallas — the 1982 valedictorian of Ursuline Academy and onetime captain of its Rangerette drill team who was voted "Best Student" and "Most Likely to Succeed" by her classmates.
Her marriage to Microsoft founder Bill Gates was only mentioned in passing by two society columnists here at The Dallas Morning News in 1994.
Last weekend, after giving a keynote address at SXSW Interactive in Austin, she headed to her hometown for foundation business and to visit with friends and relatives who still live here.
She agreed to a rare interview with The News in what turned out to be a wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation — as much as we could cram into the 30 minutes allotted to us in her highly scheduled life.
The beginnings
Melinda’s moment of clarity about her life’s mission came while walking with Bill on a beach in Zanzibar at the end of their first trip to Africa in September 1993.
They’d met at a company dinner in New York shortly after she joined Microsoft in 1987, beginning a seven-year stroll to the aisle.
The engaged couple was discussing the mandated survey that they’d done with their priest in preparation for their upcoming wedding in January: What were their common beliefs, their similar ones and the differences that they needed to work on?
But the conversation shifted to their vast wealth and what to do with it, she says. They’d been unnerved by the devastation that they saw on their safari and committed to do something about it.
That became the inspirational spark for starting the foundation the next year.
“I went back to work at Microsoft and thought: “Holy smokes! What just happened to me?’
“It was life-changing for me. This is why I was put on Earth,” she says. “I met Bill [at a business dinner in New York]. What are the odds of that? And now, wow, my legacy is going to be to eventually give this wealth away. And at the time, it was the biggest pot of wealth ever.”
And that was before Warren Buffett decided to add $30 billion to the philanthropic treasure chest in 2006 with the stipulation that the Gateses stay on to run the foundation.
Bill and Melinda tied the knot on the private Hawaiian island of Lanai after a pre-wedding fireworks display and a performance by Willie Nelson.
One published report indicated that she paid $20,000 for her wedding gown and reception outfit.
“I didn’t pay nearly that much money,” she says with a scoff. “I didn’t pick a designer gown. Didn’t do it. I grew up shopping at Joske’s and The Treasury and all those places, right?”
They've been the richest couple in the world until Bill Gates was supplanted by Amazon's Jeff Bezos in Forbes' 2018 rankings. Bezos is reportedly worth $112 billion; Gates a mere $90 billion —give or take.
The Gateses live in a 66,000-square-foot uber-high-tech mansion called Xanadu 2.0 on the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle. Together they run the largest foundation on the planet with an endowment of $40.3 billion as of year-end 2016.
In 2008, Buffett told Fortune magazine: "He's smart as hell, obviously. But in terms of seeing the whole picture, she's smarter."
Using her voice
For years, Melinda, who grew up in North Dallas as Melinda French, cloistered herself from the public eye, mostly to protect the privacy of her three children.
“I wanted them to be known for who they were,” she says. Now that the Gateses' two daughters, ages 21 and 15, and son, 18, are established in their school communities, she feels they need to see her in a more global light.
“There are things that I care about in the world where I can be a role model for my kids by saying, ‘Make a difference in the world,’ and to my daughters, ‘Use your voice.’ ”
There are no trust funds for the Gates kids. “I knew a lot of kids in college who did have trust funds,” she says. “We believe the right thing to do with these resources is for the vast majority of them to go back into society.”
She also believes it’s her humanitarian duty as the world’s most powerful woman in philanthropy to fight for gender equality here and abroad.
She formed Pivotal Ventures in 2015 as her private office to coordinate all of the strands of her philanthropic and advocacy work that might not fit neatly within the structure of the foundation. She says it allows her to make the most of her time, celebrity and resources to empower women and girls.
“I have seen so much [in the developing world] after 17 years of travels with the foundation,” she says. “I thought, ‘If I can give voice to women who I meet all over the world, who don’t have voice and who need things from the world, then I need to step up and do that.’
“That’s why I speak out more now. My voice will predominantly be used on behalf of women in the developing world.”
When you’re giving out unfathomable amounts of money, people tend to listen.
And if you don’t like what you hear — as was the case in 2012 when the Catholic Diocese of Dallas took issue with her $560 million pledge to expand birth control access for impoverished women around the globe — so be it.
Influenced by Dallas
Dallas helped shape Melinda into who she is — and isn’t — today.
She learned to be a servant leader from her parents’ example and Ursuline’s motto of serviam ("I will serve”).
“But I also knew from growing up in Dallas that if I was ever wealthy how I didn’t want to act,” she says, not needing to expand on this point.
Indeed, almost everything about Melinda is understated. When we meet, she is wearing taupe slacks with a deep coral jacket and has a chic pink watch with a large face on her left wrist. Her manicured nails are a natural soft pink. Her wedding ring is a simple band of small diamonds. No Chiclet-sized engagement diamond for her.
Dallas philanthropist Lyda Hill had dinner with Melinda on Monday night at The Mansion on Turtle Creek. The two became mutual admirers through Buffett’s Giving Pledge, where 175 billionaires so far have pledged to give at least half of their fortunes to philanthropic causes.
“Melinda is the strong, intelligent woman you expect,” says Hill, principal of LH Holdings Inc. and founder of the foundation that bears her name. “She is also a very personable gal who is easy to interact with.
“When she told us she was taking on family planning in Africa some years ago, my admiration went up. As a Catholic from Ursuline, she stepped up to what she sees as right.”
In high school, Melinda lived on Princess Circle in the Disney Streets neighborhood of Midway Hills just south of Royal Lane, where the mid-century style homes are on streets named after Walt Disney creations.
Little did she know that she’d grow up to marry her Prince Charming and become royalty of sorts.
Her dad, Ray French, was an aerospace engineer for LTV Corp. in Grand Prairie, working on the Apollo space missions. Elaine French was a stay-at-home mom tending to her brood of four. Melinda has an older sister and two younger brothers. Her parents now live in San Diego.
As a teenager, Melinda watched Dynasty. And while Alexis Carrington, the villainous Denver female counterpart to JR Ewing on Dallas, wasn't exactly the perfect role model, the conniving female executive was one of the few TV characters who packed business power outside of the home.
“The thing I saw in Alexis Carrington was that I knew I wanted to work. I just did,” Melinda says. “I knew I wanted to have kids, for sure. But I wanted to work.”
She also watched The Bionic Woman and thought Jaime Sommers was ultra cool. And when it came to Charlie's Angels, she wanted to be the smart brunette.
Each of her teenage experiences helped her on her path to success.
She learned leadership skills as captain of the Rangerettes, who perform at Jesuit high school football games. “I was managing 55 girls with teenage hormones and boyfriends. I had to discipline my peers. We still joke and laugh about that,” she says. “I learned that I liked being a leader, and I could be good at it.”
A new passion
Melinda’s life was set on a new trajectory when her advanced math teacher, Susan Bauer, convinced Ursuline’s principal to set up a small computer lab with Apple IIs.
“[Bauer] asked our math class, ‘Would any of you be interested in taking this elective with me?’ A group of us said, ‘Sure.’ And I loved it. I was so hooked,” Melinda recalls. “We borrowed an Apple II from a neighbor so that my sister and I could tinker around and play on it. I loved these adventure games. They were so cool. Then I started programming.”
Over the years, the Gateses have given $15 million to Ursuline to start laptop programs, support science, math and technology education and help build The French Family Science, Math and Technology Center, a 70,000-square-foot LEED Gold-certified laboratory and classroom building that was dedicated in 2010.
Last year, Melinda received Ursuline’s distinguished alumna award.
Her father knew that his salary as an engineer wouldn’t pay for college tuition for four children. So her parents started a little real estate side hustle that bought small rent houses.
“We would literally fix them up on the weekends as a family. I mowed a lot of lawns. I did Easy-Off on ovens. I pulled up carpet. I painted. That rental property money was the down payment for each of our college.”
But with that hard labor came a new labor of love.
Her father bought an Apple III to keep track of business.
When she told Bill that her family owned an Apple III, he was impressed, even though it was a competitor’s brand. “There were only 2,000 of those ever sold,” she says. “I could program on it. My sister and I kept the books on VisiCalc.”
She loved programming so much that she searched for colleges with computer science programs and zeroed in on Notre Dame, a Catholic university that offered her a small scholarship. But when she and her dad visited the campus, they discovered that its computer science program had been dismantled because the school thought computers were a fad, she says. “I was crushed.”
Instead she chose Duke, which had two computer labs, thanks to the largesse of IBM.
She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics in 1986, followed by her MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business the next year.
Too much testosterone
It wasn’t just those TV characters that captured her imagination.
Her father had female mathematicians on each of his Apollo mission teams. She met them at company picnics and wanted to be like them.
“I wanted to be at the table, right? I wanted to make a major contribution,” she says. “That’s why Microsoft was so attractive. They were on the cutting edge of this amazing new software, and I could see where it was going.”
Her job interview wasn’t about specific products but rather a conversation about what the world would look like in the future. “I was like, ‘I want to be a part of this.’ And I knew I could be, because I’d seen women on teams. And I’d seen women be good at business.”
But she seriously considered quitting her dream job shortly after landing it.
It wasn’t that she was the only woman in her 10-person hiring class of 1987. She was used to that.
It was the aggressive, combative and often abrasive culture that she found at the Redmond, Wash., software giant that she found herself bumping up against.
“It was very male dominated, right?” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just not right for this place,’ ” she says. “You start to doubt yourself. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that women doubt themselves instead of doubting the culture and saying, ‘Wait a minute. It shouldn’t be like this.’ ”
She couldn’t fit the mold, so she broke it.
Gates learned to be herself, and it worked. She eventually managed 1,700 people at Microsoft.
“I could attract talent from all over the company,” Gates recalls. “People would say to me, ‘How did you get that amazing developer to come work on your project?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know. Maybe they just want to work in this culture.’ We were collaborative, and we would do things together. We had each other’s back.”
She retired from Microsoft in 1996 to focus on starting a family and raising her children.
These days, her big escape is a day on the lake in her kayak. “I just love it,” she says.
And she can trace her love of water to living in land-locked Dallas for so many years.
“Part of growing up in Dallas is you find somebody else who has a boat. You trailer it to these various lakes. Seattle had this enormous lake in the middle of the city and we live on it. So a day when the sun comes out, even when it’s cold, I put on warm jackets and I stay safe and close to the shore and I get in my kayak. That is a total guilty pleasure. Couldn’t do that in Dallas, right?”
Well, maybe she could’ve done this on White Rock Lake? Mm, maybe not.
Given the hectic pace she keeps, it’s easy to imagine why a little serenity is heavenly for her.
Melinda Ann French Gates
Title: Co-founder and co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Founder, Pivotal Ventures
Age: 53
Born and raised: Dallas
Education: St. Monica Catholic School, 1978; Ursuline Academy of Dallas, 1982; bachelor's degree in computer science and economics, Duke University, 1986; MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, 1987.
Personal: Married to Bill Gates for 23 years. They have two daughters 21 and 15 and an 18-year-old son.
