Bill and Melinda Gates released their annual letter to the entire world on Monday on Bill’s personal blog, The Gates Notes LLC.
One focus of the letter is a lament by Melinda Gates that women do too much unpaid work — like housework — and don’t get paid wages for it.
“This is one of those root inequalities that exist all over in society and we just don’t talk about it very much,” Melinda Gates told The New York Times.
The “time poverty” of unpaid work must be addressed to “unlock the potential of women,” the billionaire wife proclaimed.
A cultural shift is critical, she said, and she believes her incessant complaints about having to drive her own daughter to an expensive private preschool have caused such a cultural shift right here in the United States.
Melinda Gates complained so much about the driving role, she said, that her husband, Bill Gates, then the chief executive officer at Microsoft, agreed to drive the couple’s daughter to school twice each week.
“Moms started going home and saying to their husbands, ‘If Bill Gates can drive his daughter, you better darn well drive our daughter or son,'” Melinda Gates told the Times. “If you’re going to get behavior change, you have to role-model it publicly.”
The preschool to which the Gates parents dutifully drove is not clear. For K-12 school, the ultra-wealthy couple has sent their three children — Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe — to Lakeside School, a posh prep school in Seattle where annual tuition runs more than $30,000. (RELATED: Bill Gates Loves Common Core For Your Kids, BUT NOT HIS)
Gates said she observed the problem of “time poverty” when she was jetting around the world in luxury to observe poor people. Also, she said, she has viewed time-use data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Melinda Gates said the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will attempt to decrease “time poverty” for women in developing nations by giving them contraceptives and mobile phones. (The theory behind the free phones is that women will be able to access information better.)
In the United States, the Times notes, women allegedly spend four hours each day on unpaid work while men spend just 2.5 hours.
Before she married Bill Gates, Melinda Gates was a project manager at Microsoft. She was a supervisor for Microsoft Bob, one of the company’s most stupendous failures.
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