Melinda Gates: A Trailblazer

Melinda Gates is often left underrecognized, as many people mainly identify her as the wife of Bill Gates. However, ranked in Forbes for multiple years as one of the world’s most powerful women, she deserves to be recognized in her own right. Warren Buffett has once said that Bill Gates is “smart as hell, obviously ... but in terms of seeing the whole picture, [Melinda's] smarter.” She is co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is “guided by the belief that every life has equal value… [and] works to help people lead healthy, productive lives.” Melinda Gates additionally focuses on women empowerment and has recently published a New York Times Bestseller book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World.

            Gates was born in 1964 into a Catholic family. She attended Catholic school before attending Duke University. She completed a double degree in computer science and economics in 1986 and completed her MBA at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987. Soon after she graduated, she went on to join Microsoft as a marketing manager, was which a new yet rising company at the time. She eventually met Bill Gates at a company picnic, and they married several years later in 1994. Melinda Gates left Microsoft a few years later and founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, which “she helmed virtually on her own for the first six years of operation.” Currently, the foundation is reported to be the biggest foundation in the world. Among other accomplishments, the foundation has aided in eradicating polio worldwide, preventing AIDS, and making vaccines accessible to children worldwide.

            A trait that makes Melinda Gates a creative individual is her openness to experience, which is a trait that allows people to “literally see the world differently,” according to Luke Smillie. By reading her book and watching interviews with her, it becomes clear that she thinks of new ideas and makes risky moves because she is open to experience. She discusses in her book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, how she was offered a job at a well-established company but instead chose to work at Microsoft for the possibility of the opportunity for more growth. She took a big risk doing that, and her risk has undoubtedly led to success. 

            Additionally, what makes Melinda Gates a Big C creative, beyond her other work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is her use of her power and success to focus on women empowerment as the solution to world poverty. When discussing this topic, Gates truly utilized divergent thinking to propose and work on this unique and pointed solution to poverty. She discusses in her book about her balance of her Catholic faith and her deep belief that access to contraception is the solution for world poverty. Hence, her divergent thinking is further shown by the fact that she is a proponent of making contraception for women easily available worldwide.

            Furthermore, Melinda Gate’s motivations for her work is clearly intrinsic. She has discussed previously how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was born out of the inability to turn a blind eye to health and wealth disparities globally, and both her and Bill Gates have funneled billions of their personal wealth to aid others. Additionally, as they both had already reached the heights of their careers with Microsoft, the creative philanthropic work that came about afterwards had no extrinsic motivations.

            Overall, although Melinda Gates was crucial to the success of Microsoft as a company, her work afterwards is arguably just as incredible, if not more-so. As the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she has created a foundation that has had the biggest hand in eradicating global preventable diseases, vaccinating more than 500 million children, and giving almost 120 million women access to contraceptives. Her work, therefore, makes her a Big C creative whose work has impacted lives unlike anyone else.  

References:

https://time.com/5690596/melinda-gates-empowering-women/

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/infographic-look-millions-lives-saved-and-improved-gates-foundation-171643/

https://www.businessinsider.com/life-of-melinda-gates-2016-3#at-a-company-picnic-gates-now-husband-bill-asked-if-shed-like-to-join-him-on-a-date-in-two-weeks-she-turned-him-down-because-he-wasnt-spontaneous-enough-within-an-hour-he-asked-to-take-her-out-that-night-and-she-agreed-the-pair-kept-a-low-profile-at-work-and-asked-colleagues-and-family-members-to-respect-their-privacy-8