Melinda Gates is the most powerful woman philanthropist on the planet, presiding, with husband Bill Gates, over an endowment of $39.6 billion.
She’s also a former Microsoft MSFT +0.34% product manager, with a computer science degree from Duke. And as she told tech site Backchannel in an interview on Wednesday, she’s troubled by a decrease in the number of CS degrees earned by women in the three decades since her graduation.
The longtime advocate for women and girls is set to deploy some of her considerable resources on just that problem. She’s setting up a personal office, separate from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to help get more women into tech — an industry plagued by bias, sexism, and a leadership gap that sees men take the vast majority of senior positions.
The new office is still in “learning mode”, as Gates put it, conducting research and meeting with experts. But she did single out a few of the issues she’ll focus on, including putting money behind data on gender-related topics.
“We are just now starting to make the data investments,” Gates said. “I can’t go convince governments to work on female issues unless I have data. I think in the tech space, men don’t really see a problem and a lot of the money is held by men.”
She also noted the woeful statistics on venture funding for businesses run by non-white women. (A recent study by Project Diane found that black women, the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country, received only .2% of all venture funding in the past five years.)
“We’re only talking about the women’s piece of this, but are you kidding?” she said. “The diversity numbers for blacks and Latinos are terrible in these things.”
Gates told Backchannel she’s been quietly working to improve family leave policies — crucial in the fight both to attract women to tech, and to retain them.
“I’m starting to make investments behind the scenes on family leave,” she said. “We have to have good family leave policies in this country. At the federal, state, and private-sector level. We just have to. At least in this political environment, the one good thing that’s happening right now is that it’s not anymore whether we should have it, it’s now how to have it.”
Credit:
Forbes Staff
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