Melinda Gates: The Advocate

Melinda Gates is a Woman of the Year because… “As an effective and strategic leader, she’s dedicated to solving the world’s toughest problems.”

—Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and 1992 and 2008 Woman of the Year

Activist extraordinaire: Gates, photographed at Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park. “The center of the way that Melinda operates,” says 2011 Woman of the Year Barbara Bush, “is listening. She wants to understand people. She wants to understand the world.”

When Melinda Gates was in grade school, she was assigned to a lower-level math class. Her surprised mother, Elaine, asked the teacher why. It turned out that Melinda had actually qualified for a higher level, but the classroom was short a chair, and the teacher figured Melinda was so sweet she wouldn’t mind. Elaine offered to come in after church every day to move a chair into the classroom if necessary. (Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.)

For years this story has stuck with Gates because it serves as a powerful reminder of two things: (1) that big problems can have simple solutions and (2) that those who can help, should.

When Melinda and her husband, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, got engaged in 1993, they talked about donating the bulk of their fortune to charity. They’ve been making good on that promise ever since, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now among the largest nonprofit organizations on earth: It gave $3.4 billion in grants last year alone. Previously daunting problems like polio, malaria, and domestic education? Those are exactly the kinds of challenges she likes to take on.

In the past year, Gates’ work has taken her to Senegal, India, Malawi, South Africa, and Ethiopia. “She really pushes herself deeply into the issues on the ground,” says Melanne Verveer, former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues.

A wonk by nature and a computer scientist by training, Gates, 49, brings a personal, data-driven approach to her work. On one visit to Africa, women whose children were getting vaccinated asked her, “What about a shot for me?” Gates realized: “They meant a contraceptive injection. So I dug into the data and found there are more than 200 million unintended pregnancies in developing countries each year. If a woman already has four children and herself to feed and she waits to have another, her whole family will be healthier.”

It was that missing chair all over again: One contraceptive shot, Gates concluded, could strengthen a whole community. So she started a comprehensive family-planning program. As a Catholic she didn’t take this lightly. But, says Gates, “if Western women could make the most of their lives through family planning, why not the rest of the world? So much of my Catholic upbringing was about social justice, about equality.” It’s this attitude that causes people like Lena Dunham to call her work “a shining beacon of hope.” Says Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “She is empowering millions of women and girls to have a fuller, better life.”

This relentless work has made Gates, a mother of three, one of the most respected philanthropists in modern history. Says New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof: “In her obituary—hopefully many, many decades from now—it won’t say she just married a wealthy Microsoft tycoon. Rather, it will say that she and her husband changed the course of poverty around the world. And the course of global health and malnutrition. It will say that she had an impact on more lives than anyone could possibly imagine. It’s an incredible legacy.”

For Gates, though, it all goes back to what her mother taught her. “If you know how to get that one chair for that woman,” she says, “you can make a difference.”

Read more:

• Glamour Women of the Year 2013

• The Malala Fund