Melinda Gates

Bill and Melinda Gates’ work to help alleviate poverty and illness around the world was spurred by the people they met on an African safari during their engagement, photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Melinda Gates has been called one of the most powerful women on the planet, and not only because she is married to the richest man in the world. Her accomplishments, determination, smarts and heart are all her own.

Together, Melinda and her husband, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, run the largest charitable foundation in the world—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“It’s absolutely a partnership of equals,” she laughed during a recent interview with Jane Pauley on CBS’s Sunday Morning program. “It’s important to both of us that the world understands that we are running this place together… our joint values being played out in the world,” she said. So far, the foundation that bears their names has given away nearly 40 billion dollars.

Growing up, Melinda could not have dreamed about her extraordinary life ahead. Raised in a traditional middle class family, she was born on August 15, 1964 in Dallas, Texas as Melinda Ann French, the second of four children. Her father managed rental properties on the side to make extra money for the children’s college education. All the kids were expected to help out with the family business. “That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns,” recalled Melinda.

Her father, an aerospace engineer, and her mother, a stay-at-home mom, believed in the power of education. Her parents encouraged her love of math and computers, even though most girls at that time did not pursue those subjects. Melinda had fallen in love with the family’s Apple computer (Microsoft’s arch enemy), which was used to run the family business.

Melinda stayed busy with school and work, but found time to become head of the high school drill team. She was also valedictorian of her class and went on to Duke University, graduating with bachelor’s degrees in computer science and economics. Her fateful decision to move to Seattle for a job at Microsoft was made shortly after she earned her master’s degree in business administration the following year.

Although she had a job offer from IBM, a small start-up business had caught her attention, she told CBS. “I came out and interviewed with Microsoft. And I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to work at this company. They are changing the world!’ ” She worked her way up to general manger of information products at Microsoft. “Marrying the CEO wasn’t part of my life plan!” she said to Pauley.

“I met her at a New York City sales meeting,” remembers Bill Gates. “And then it was only a week or so after that that I went up to her in [Microsoft’s] parking lot and asked if she wanted to go out.”

Melinda’s reaction? “When we met, and Bill is CEO of Microsoft and I was, you know, all of 23, he actually asked me out for two weeks from Saturday night. And I said, ‘Two weeks from Saturday night? How could you possibly know what you’re doing? My schedule doesn’t go out that far.’ ”

But Melinda found that she enjoyed Bill’s sense of humor and was surprised at how down-to-earth he was. He was struck by her forthrightness and independence. After dating for seven years, they married in 1994.

When Melinda became pregnant a year later, she surprised Bill by saying she planned to be a stay-at-home mom. “We didn’t want our children raised by somebody else,” reported Melinda. She told Bill, “You know, if we want them to have the values we have, somebody has to be home.”

Within a year of their marriage, together will Bill’s father, William H. Gates, the couple founded what was later to become the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The new foundation was, in part, to honor Bill’s late mother, who was noted for her charitable work. During this same time period, Microsoft released Windows 95, which revolutionized the personal computer and, at age 39, Bill Gates was named the “Richest Person in the World” (for the first time).

Although Melinda gave up her career at Microsoft when she became a mom, she stayed very busy immersing herself in the work of the family foundation. And the direction of that work took a turn as a result of an African safari trip Melinda and Bill had taken during their engagement.

While on that safari, Melinda was shocked to see the overwhelming poverty, disease and poor living conditions. “We came back so touched by the people,” she said. “I grew up in the Catholic church that has a social justice mission. In fact, they used to talk about the cries of the poor. I’ve heard the cries of the poor.” Since that first trip, she and Bill have returned to Africa many times, where Melinda visits villages and speaks personally to the people, especially women and children.

Melinda travels to developing countries and speaks directly to the people the foundation works to serve. She especially enjoys meeting women and children

That first African experience shaped the work of the foundation in years to come, which is guided by Melinda’s and Bill’s shared belief that all lives have equal value, and that by giving people the tools to lead healthy, productive lives, they can help them lift themselves out of poverty. They call themselves impatient optimists.

The Gates Foundation has made remarkable progress. From working to alleviate poverty, to improving health and education, to empowering family planning around the globe, and improving technology in schools and libraries throughout the United States, the foundation focuses on the ways it can do the most good...to dramatically improve the quality of life for the most people.

Melinda’s job is to figure out how to give away billions of dollars. “We go down the chart of the greatest inequities, and give where we can effect the greatest change,” she explained to Forbes magazine.

One of the foundation’s primary goals has been to develop disease prevention strategies, vaccines and treatments where they are otherwise unavailable. “We’ve done an incredible job of bringing down the number of deaths of children under the age of five,” Melinda said of the foundation’s work. And last year there were only 37 cases of polio worldwide. “It’s the lowest number of cases we’ve ever had on the planet,” said Melinda of the foundation’s progress against polio. “We think by next year we can drive that number to absolutely zero.”

In 2006, when the Gates’ family friend, Warren Buffett, agreed to donate over $30 billion to the foundation, he told Fortune magazine about Melinda: “Bill is smart as hell, obviously...But in terms of seeing the whole picture, she’s smarter.”

The couple’s three children, Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe (ages 21 to 14), grew up learning about the foundation’s mission. Melinda and Bill often travel for their work; when possible, Melinda has planned trips around her children’s school breaks so they can all go together as a family. “As they get older, they so know that our family belief is about responsibility… we have a responsibility to give back to the world,” said Melinda. She and Bill plan to give away 95% of their enormous wealth over their lifetimes, a decision their children are proud of. They will follow Warren Buffett’s philosophy: “A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.”

Melinda and Bill’s children are growing up in the family’s sprawling 66,000 sq-ft mansion on Lake Washington, but they still work to give their children a normal life

Despite her extraordinary life, Melinda has a desire for normalcy, especially when it comes to her children. But how do you grow up normally when living in a 66,000 square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Washington? In an interview with Abigail Pesta, Melinda said she and Bill try to keep school and home life as “as normal as we can. I mean, they have an allowance, they have chores. I told them we would not get a dog unless they’re the ones to feed it and clean up after it. And guess who cleans up and feeds the dog? They do. Bill also grew up in a very middle class family. You just try to do a lot of the same things that your own parents did.” The couple schedules regular get-togethers like family movie nights and family swim time. Last month, Bill – the king of high tech – revealed that he and Melinda didn’t allow their children to own a smart phone or tablet before the age of 14, and that tech gadgets are banned at the dinner table.

Back to striving for normalcy and that mega-mansion on Lake Washington – Bill discussed the situation with Forbes. The couple had moved into the house before construction was completed and that meant contending with a hundred construction workers on a daily basis. Bill said he used to tell Melinda during the stress of the period: “Every day I want to hear one thing you like about this house. She recalls, “I’d say, ‘Okay, I like the laundry chute.’ ”

Melinda told the Huffington Post about their work on the foundation: “For Bill and me, this is the focus of our life now and we get huge blessings… It blesses our marriage, because we talk about these issues, we’re passionate about them and we support one another, we see things together and separately and learn from that. It blesses our family life, because we talk with our kids about people across the world and ways that you might help them. We let them experience some of it. So it changes you in lots of meaningful and profound ways.”

Melinda and Bill Gates have received countless awards and accolades. In 2016, they received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama for their philanthropic work around the world.

“On the day I die, I want people to think that I was a great mom and a great family member and a great friend. I care about that more than I care about anything else,” Melinda said. She told Jane Pauley, “I read this poem that I loved at my high school graduation speech about what a successful life was to me. And it’s to know that one life has breathed easier because you’ve lived. To me, that’s success.”