Everybody. I am bradley graham, the coowner and everybody at the bookstore and all the great folks, welcome. Thank you very much for coming. Every time we do a joint author event like tonight which we love doing by the way and marvelous facility, i think back 15 years when the building was up for sale and how close it came to being transformed into a nightclub. It came this close but instead the s founders and the staff hae transformed the wonderful place over the pastnd decade and a haf into the vibrant Community Center that it is today, lets have around of applause for that. We have a great event for you this evening featuring Melinda Gates here to talk about her new book, the moment of lift, this is melindas debut as an author and her book is part memoir and part call for more action as melinda recount the mission she been on, she tells the story tof her journey from taken a jb at microsoft in 1987 fresh out of Business School to marrying bill gates seven years later to partnering with her husband and creating and sharing their foundation in becoming one of the worlds most prominent advocates for empowering women. As her compassionate narrative makes clear, she is becoming driven by the belief that no one should be excluded and all lives have equal value and when women and girls are lifted up everywhere, everyone l benefits. [applause] one of the most appealing aspects of the books is melindas revealing account of the raising of her own consciousness of a woman from the time pregnant with her first child when she assumes after the babys birth she woulde stop working and stay home because thats what women did to today when she considers herself a feminist pushing to take down barriers and vice the hold women back. Melinda said she wrote her book to share the stories of many of the women she has met s around e world and she does so empathetically and powerfully giving voice to the struggles dealing with discrimination, child marriage, unreliable healthcare, lack of access to education, lack of access to contraception, and nonpaid work. These stories are affecting an inspiring as one reviewer said, another call to the moment of lift and eloquently argued work. Melinda will be in conversation this evening with another leader in the world, patty, patty and melinda have known each other for years, since their days gegether at microsoft and in 19 andy seven she shifted from becoming the top email executive at a microsoft to help build the largest foundation, she served for more than a decade as ceo of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation and now president and ceo of marthas table in d. C. [applause] and she is also involved in many other organizations. Melinda and patty will join us in just p a moment but first we have a short video, thank you and i hope you enjoy this evenings moment of lift. When i was little these launches were a huge deal of my life, i still feel in my bones the suspense of the countdowns. Especially that moment of lift when the engine unites and the earth shakes and the rocket starts to rise. As i have traveled the world 20 years doing the work of the foundation i cofounded with my husband bill, i wondered how can we summon a moment of lift for human beings and especially for women. Becausee sometimes all that is leded to liftp women up is the thought for women bound. In my trouble i have learned about hundreds of millions of women who want to decide whether or when they have children. But they cannot and there are many other rights and privileges that women and girls are denied. The right to go to school, start a business, run for office, study computers, find investors, sometimes the rights are denied under law or even other allowed by law, this so often denied by cultural bias against women. If we are going to take her place equalac with men, it will not come one by one or stepbystep, women and men should all Work Together to take down the barriers and in the bias nest that still hold women back. More than at any time in the past we have the knowledge and energy and moral insight to practice the patterns of history. Our call is to lift women up. When you lift up women, you lift up humanity. Please welcome patty stone pfeiffer and Melinda Gates. [applause] good evening. Brad already showed that he is a feminist himself and when he said melinda and i have known each other for years, the truth is, its 30wn years. So we do appreciate that brad amongst other things. So with that, we will jump right in and my first question is broad which melinda, it is clear from the video and everything that we know that you have one of the most productive and busy lives, there is impact that you can have with every day in every decision you make for you to get in normans amount of time to write this book and then to join us here in others around the country too discuss the message u empowerment. Why did you do that . Thank you. And thanks brad for having us in this amazing space. It is so fabulous to be inn d. C. At the Nations Capital and i was out today and got to enjoy the weather with the dog on the mall before this. And i have to say, coming here as a little girl when i first came as a senior in high school and learning about the government and the importance and to be able to jog into the African American museum and the rightful place as one of the most amazing things. [applause] i wrote this book and took the time to write this book because of so many things i have learned through chapels, 20 years of traveling for the foundation which patty did to during the ten years she was there, various low Income Countries at least three times a year, i absolutely do government meetings, partner meetings but the most support thing i do is to meet with people on the ground and these women have shared the stories of their lives with metg m and its really animating my life and cause me too action in ways and never in a million years wouldve expected and i decided to write the book and share my journey in hopes to inspire others. Because i really believe if we lift up women, they lift up everybody else and i see it all the time everywhere i go. Melinda talks about the many of the male allies that she meant and relies on along the way but when is bill, a fantastic Global Health leader who inspired and meant toward both of us and talked allbo the time in the early years of the foundation, our responsibility to be good ancestors. What he meant by that is that our actions today would have resounding impact for decades im not generations to come. He meant that on a personal basis and in the book, you share several stories about how bills family andnd your family were te ancestors that prepared you for this work. I sometimes think its amazing in life the people that come into your life, someone like bill and many other people i mentioned in the book. And you try to listen and learn from them and his role about ancestors had h me thinking because i was lucky to meet a man who believed in inequality, i tell some stories and we can talk about those where it took us a while to achieve that intermarriage. Its a work in process for all of us. But he believed in it and i think that is because he had a mother and father who absolutely believed in it and i saw at the dinner table while they were dating that they were both extraordinarily minded and very engaged in the Seattle Community and engaged on the national level. No bill came from a family believed in inequality i watched his mom support his dads career and washes father support his moniker as well. In my family, i came from a home where s my parents sent all of s four siblings, two brothers and an older sister to Catholic School k12 and i really learned the mission of social justice from the Catholic Church. And my parents both believed in the Catholic Church but when they disagree, they would petition the catholicc church. My dad was an Aerospace Engineer and worked on the Apollo Mission and he talked often as young girls of bringing women onto his team because it made his Technical Team better and when we could seeki the four kids and my dad engineers put us all through college, my parents started a Real Estate Investment business and my mom ran it during the day and we as kids and my dad worked on it at night and on weekends. So i really learned from them so many things about how a young woman could be in the world and i could be anything i wanted to be and that was a very Important Message too have. One person who is not here today, but still very present in all of our work is bill gates senior he you share in the book that in the 1940s he wrote his thesis on the future world which he saw as having men and women have absolutely equal rights and equal positions. He was unbelievable, a young man when he wrote that in factnb my niece married, we call him poppy in the family but he is always been for women. And that is something i really admire. Ice at as far away from melinda to bill senior for that decade and there were many, many times when he underscored the fact and some were racier than others but one is a pg version and when the gates millennium scholars were underway and we got the first round about the applicant and we realized young women of color were applying a two times the rate to the young men and we thought, what should we do in their campaign, and he said how about we wait 100 years and then worry about it. [laughter] he did not really want to wait 100 years but he did have the sense that there was a time to get things right. So fastforward on the ancestors to the 1980s and you make decisions on your own even with the wonderful upbringing to be fascinated a by and become expes at technology, to stay at duke for a long time getting your undergrad and grad degree and then joining the roughandtumble maledominated tech world called microsoft. What were you thinking and how do the wellbehaved catholic girl from texas who manage those years . Yes i got an undergraduate degree to the university and went on in, mba at duke and microsoft was interviewing for the first time on campus at duke. I was lucky enough to have an internship in dallas, a group in dos texas and had internship several summers in a row working for ibm, fabulous job, i had a standing offer to go to ibm in p eallas. They were still living in dallas so i thought i was probably going to do that but i let ibm know i was going too interview t other places. Sure enough, i went back to spring break for ibm in my hiring manager a woman said are you ready to accept an eye one less company, i want to go interview with, and she said would you mind me asking who and i said its a Small Company up in seattle, about 1400 people at the time and she said oh microsoft and i said yes and she said would you like a piece of advice and she said, if you get a job offer there should take it. In it for me. And i said why and she said i think your chance for advancement looks really good and ibm i think would be a fabless career but if you go to young startup and do well as a young woman i think youre right would be media work so when interviewed in a good set of interviews looped but i was one of the few females who is in the lab and iran teams at duke of allman, allmale programmers and i knew i was good at managing. I was there aum few years later and it was roughandtumble and i use the word abrasive at times and i did a not actually like myself a coupleou of years, it wasnt too long at the time you are starting that i thought about quitting. Because they did not like how he was in life and when i went to the Grocery Store or with other people in traffic, i do not like myself because i knew how to play that game so i thought all stay for a while and try to be myself i did not think it would work but i started to be myself and it started to work and as you know we started to find her men and women who wanted to work in that style. I eventually worked for patty in the Consumer Division and my best friend was made pure we both worked for patty as well as men and we had a division where people wanted to work in a different and more collaborative way and we were getting amazing programmers from all over the company. But i think people just wanted to work in a more collaborative way and it could be myself and successful. Part of it to be frank was having a female not only role model but manager and we could talk about and i could talk with charlotte and my other male colleagues about how hard it was lot watching you you. You had my back and had other peoples back. It is true we would describe it as a place where you put your fist up in the morning and did not put them down until the end of the day. When you do that at work you sometimes forget not to do that at home or in the Grocery Store or driving down the highway to get to work on time. And i know that culture has continued to evolve but we will talk more about culture throughout this discussion because at the end of the day it is about creating cultures where people can win without having their fist up, nothing very good comes of that. So fastforward, you met this interesting passionate man and you and bill married on new years day 1994, at least two of us were there. [laughter] and sandy who is in the audience. And ill tell you one thing about the gates family, theyre very competitive and melinda and her family joined in right away but they believed inin equalizig things in the Beach Volleyball game in order to even out that bill senior is 6foot 7 and we all were members to play volleyball. And some of us knew better how to play volleyball in a mumu than others. [laughter] but famously at the same wedding bills mother was battling cancer and stood up at the womens luncheon and share line that nsreally resonated with the relationship you and bill already had. Would you share that with us. We had my mom stand up and read a letter that she written to me and mary gates read her letter separately and marys letter said, to whom much is given, much is expected. And i think in a certain way maybe mary understood where my life was going in a way that i at 29 did not understand. She was deeply involved in three appropriate inactivity. She had always hoped and pushed her son at the dinner table to do the United Way Campaign be more civic minded and he was but he kept saying mom im going to but ill do it later. He did united way in a big way with microsoft document way my money later. But i think she knew that then in the other thing she said at the end of the letter which iswn incredibly beautiful letter that i kept back and even went for my mom, she said i hope you love your bill as much as i love mi mine. That is super nice. She did died the following year. Six months of us getting married. And within the twoyear timeframe bill senior had stepped forward and begun to do the largest checkbook Kitchen Table through the prewere you in taking ideas and offers and proposals and reviewed them and consider them and send the best over to you to look at on sunday afternoon with bill and i joined in 97 but the line about carpenters to carpenter every problem is a nail. We were really good at what we did, we understood products to your passion started with education where we became aware of the challenges of health we became big advocates, successful advocates and the supporters of vaccine developmentnt and delivy and when it came to libraries in s,the united states, we connectd every labor in the united states. So we were pretty good carpenters and saw a lot of nails. But melinda has a rare gift and you begin immediately to listen in a way that perhaps those of us busy hammering too quickly were not hearing. And you begin to ask people questions and listen to the answers and one of those was a woman named mina and i remember you after different trips we would leave each others voicemails. And to say i dont want to talk to you i just want to listen to your voicemail. We would debrief and download and you talk about on theik way home feeling like someone had punched you in the got because there was so much pain and knowledge that you had to process any processed it on the flight back and in the days after words but you speak in the book about how certainly everywhere we went when we are asking did you have your child vaccine and the woman would say yes there been vaccinated maitri my card, what about my shot or the shot that keptt me healthy and kept me from delivery. A woman named mina and she had just had childbirth and had gone pto a program that we were very proud of called sure start. And she was very excited to have the healthy birth, the first one she had attended and melinda got a chance to talk to her and she raved how much of that was that her prior birth but you asked her question and that changed everything. I was there in northern india to talk to her because she had a young son standing by her side and her husband in a beautiful new born baby boy in her arms that she clearly loved and is there to talk to her about her Safe Delivery in this clinic that we in the Indian Government help support because we know women going to clinics, less likely to die in childbirth and the child is more likely to live through the childbirth. She had a wonderful experience, telling me all about it, a little bit shy but willing to talk. I was about ready to finish up the visit that i had with her and i said, a last question, what are your hopes and dreams for these two beautiful sons that you have. And she cast her eyes down for a long time and i thought, i asked in indelicate question, i made a mistake. And all of a sudden she looked up with tears in her eyes after she so warm and smiling when she looked me in the eyes and said the truthrs is, i have no hope,o hope for feeding the sun or this one and im done breastfeeding nor educating them. And all she knew i was a western andn in a pair khaki pants a tshirt and she said, would you take them home with you. That is their only hope. And i was devastated after that trip because for any mother anywhere in the world who loves her children to ask a stranger to take them home it tells you how dire the circumstances were and i learned from talking with her and many other women that you have to let your heart break over time, i learned to take time after a trip to india were many countri