Why I admire Melinda Gates

Melinda and Bill Gates’s divorce is bad news, and not only for them and their children. Their marriage was a symbol of hope for women who aspire to an equal marriage after giving up their careers — a symbol that is now broken. They both used to speak about their relationship as a marriage “between equals” — though they acknowledged that it took “a while” to get there. Melinda managed to regain equality with her husband many years after she gave up her job to dedicate herself fully to her family. She did so by becoming co-chair of the multi-billion-dollar Gates Foundation. 

Women’s right to equality is a relatively recent achievement and, as such, still a precarious one. Some women (myself included) believe that equality needs to be enshrined from the very beginning of a couple’s life. We think that losing our economic independence at any point leads to a level of inequality in a relationship that is almost impossible to reverse later on. We fear that if we give up our jobs, men will see us as their support rather than their equal, and we worry that once we’ve started down that path, there is no way back. That is why many of us work like horses during our maternity years, and ensure we do not miss a beat from our professional lives while we raise our children. Melinda was the proof that there may be other ways to achieve equality.

I admire Melinda Gates for many reasons. But I mostly admire her for having the courage to speak openly about how difficult it still is today for women to feel equal in a marriage. How she struggled to dedicate herself to her family while her husband’s career rocketed. And how she had to go through the mental journey of seeing herself as truly equal before she could demand to be treated as an equal by her husband and others. 

It would have been difficult to feel equal to a man as successful as Bill Gates under most circumstances. But doing so in the world of tech is a monumental achievement. It is a world full of men who not only excel at what they do, but who are so overwhelmingly confident that they feel they can tackle anything in the world, no matter how daunting — from conquering space to fighting a pandemic. The fact they may have no knowledge at all of the issue at hand never seems to be seen by them as an obstacle. 

Having lived for over two years in Silicon Valley, I can easily imagine Melinda’s struggle to be seen as an equal in the tech world, where many men just “look through” rather than “look at” women. They certainly rarely “look up” to them. I can picture her despair, like mine, at mothers still being expected to attend school-related meetings in the middle of the morning. And her frustration at the little indignities that women go through on an almost daily basis: the social gatherings where women are approached with the question “do you have children?”; the way in which some men talk to each other without acknowledging that there is a woman beside them; or the dinners where women remain silent while men pontificate about the world. Even the few women who have managed to make it in the tech industry still have some way to go in terms of treating other women as truly equal to men. 

Threats to equality don’t exist only in the world of tech. We live under the illusion that the majority of couples exist in a relationship of equals. But truly equal marriages are still the exception rather than the rule. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll see who is the person who makes most of the compromises, the one who goes through life carrying the responsibility of running a household on their shoulders, the one who is always first to give up professional or social commitments: it’s mostly still the woman. While many of us are certainly in far more equal relationships than others, few, if any, of us enjoy full equality. 

Women have achieved levels of equality that seemed unreachable only a few decades ago. We have earned equality before the law and made great strides toward equality in the workplace — but what we are still missing is full equality at home. Reaching such equality starts by speaking openly about how difficult it still is to be in a truly equal relationship, as Melinda Gates has done. 

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