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Not sure why they put Melinda's gender as a handicap, it allowed her to get things handed to her on a platter by Bill. She is now loved and famous thanks to spe

• daliusd 7y ago
  Citation needed. Have we read the same thing?
• imInGoodCompany 7y ago
  I can't find any references in the report to Melinda as an example of gender inequality, and it seems extremly atypical of the Gates' to say that. Which part are you referring to, exactly?
  • commandlinefan 7y ago
    Well, the title of the article is "HOW GEOGRAPHY AND GENDER STACK THE DECK FOR (OR AGAINST) YOU". Yet they don't provide any examples or evidence that your gender works for or against you _except_ in the cases of poor countries. It seems a little underhanded to imply that women are disadvantaged in western countries - if anything, it's the other way around.
  • henryaj 7y ago
    It's in the graph at the top, under the title "Starting Out Ahead" - see the large bump under 'gender' in Melinda's life plot
  • trevyn 7y ago
    It’s in the “journey” graphic, where Melinda has to scale a “gender” hump: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/assets/2019-report/starting-out-ahead.png https://www.gatesfoundation.org/goalkeepers/assets/2019-repo...
    • itronitron 7y ago
      the visual organization of that graphic is deeply flawed as it suggests that each person overcomes those obstacles in a series of consecutive steps, on their journey
    • imInGoodCompany 7y ago
      Hm. I do find that to be in somewhat poor taste, but only because they've drawn her gender-hurdle as being almost the same size as the one for the girl born in Sahel. I'm willing to bet that if you asked the Gates, they would both say that the girl born in Sahel faces a far more considerable gender hurdle than Melinda did.
      • ulucs 7y ago
        I'd say they just ran a regression on the variables without any interactions between gender and other variables. It seems more likely than them trying to make an argument about equal struggles.
• re-actor 7y ago
  What a patently absurd take. Implying that the only part of Melinda's experience that matters is how much money she has access to. If you really think she's experienced no negatives due to her gender I ask you to consider what common negative experience would be for women, I'm sure you'll find that status and wealth don't much change the nature of these experiences.
  • leereeves 7y ago
    In the US, more men are victims of violent crime, more men are unemployed, more men are homeless, more men commit suicide, fewer men go to college. The "patently absurd take" is that women are the disadvantaged gender in the US. (Obviously the situation is very different in some countries.)
    • fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      More men are raped as well, both as children and as adults if you count prisons, which as a society we generally don't and that in and of itself is informative.
      • eevilspock 7y ago
        > More men are raped as well More? OMG that is about as self-serving a piece of false information as I've ever come across here on HN.
        • DuskStar 7y ago
          How so? Is it false? I know I've heard similar things before - more men raped each year, counting prison, than women in the US - and considering the state of our prisons it feels reasonable.
        • fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
          "In 2008, it was estimated 216,000[2] inmates were sexually assaulted while serving time, according to the Department of Justice figures. That is compared to 90,479[3] rape cases outside of prison."[1] Men are 92% of the prison population[4] [1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2449454/More-men-raped-US-women-including-prison-sexual-abuse.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2449454/More-men-ra... [2]https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=317 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=317 [3]https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible-rape-cases-in-the-usa-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible... [4]https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_gender.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_gende...
• deleted 7y ago
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• noonespecial 7y ago
  The same would be true for anyone who won the lottery. Yes, extraordinary luck can radically alter normal circumstances, but that's a meaningless outlier.
  • AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
    I would not use someone who won the lottery to illustrate an article about social fairness.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • noonespecial 7y ago
      I was merely pointing out that if the argument is that a given class is underpaid or systemically has less opportunity, finding a single counterexample that became so by essentially pure luck isn't much of a refutation.
  • username90 7y ago
    Fortune 500 CEO's are also like winning the lottery, but we still use that as a way to say that men are privileged. Can't we do the same thing here? Sure there aren't a lot of women who marry billionaires, but there are plenty who marry millionaires. Also I don't know of any men who gets to open a charity with his wife's money or influence, but I know a lot of women who do. Even the first lady of USA gets a charity fund and a small crew of people to help her spend it, why do we do that? Because that is what we expect powerful husbands to do for their wives. Shouldn't such things get taken into account when we dole out privilege points? I mean, men are more likely to earn a lot of money and influence, yes, but women are much more likely to marry into a lot of money and influence. So if your goal is to get a lot of money and influence but don't want to do the sacrifices required for it then you'd rather be a woman. Or in other words, marrying into wealth and getting to spend said wealth on your pet projects is one of the most privileged roles you can have and the sex ratio for said role is extremely skewed in favor of women. Taking Melinda as an example of a woman who had to struggle due to her gender is very poor taste since she is basically the embodiment of female privilege.
• brosinante 7y ago
  Looks like your reddit is leaking.
• dmurray 7y ago
  It can still be a handicap statistically speaking, just as geography would be for an African billionaire. Not every male billionaire has a wife with the same level of power and prestige as Melinda Gates, so there is some statistical inequality here.
• nickpeterson 7y ago
  Keep in mind the ages of the people this is about. Melinda met Bill while working as a GM at Microsoft. She was working in tech in the mid-late 80's. I don't find it much of a leap to believe the subject of gender came up in her professional life in a negative way.
• pdpi 7y ago
  > Not sure why they put Melinda's gender as a handicap, it allowed her to get things handed to her on a platter by Bill. She is now loved and famous thanks to spending Bill's money on charity without taking any of the downsides and hate related to starting a company and fiercely clawing yourself to the top like Bill did. Take that sentiment. Now look at the Foundation, and think: Given that a lot of their charity work was her initiative, how many of the people she has to work with saw things from your perspective of "wife spending husband's money", instead of thinking about her in terms of an entrepreneur with strong financial backing? Overcoming that is part of the gender handicap at work.
  • COGlory 7y ago
    People thinking you're spending your husbands billions is not exactly a handicap. At least not one I can take seriously after reading the top couple comments on this link.
  • username90 7y ago
    Creating a charity which mainly spends money you were gifted and creating a profitable business with invested money are two totally different things.
    • pdpi 7y ago
      I think it's perfectly legitimate to describe somebody who initiates and runs a charity, and who is focused on deploying that gifted money as effectively as possible, as an entrepreneur. You don't need to be profit-driven, you can have a different goal altogether.
  • growlist 7y ago
    She's not an entrepreneur by any stretch of the imagination.
  • huangbong 7y ago
    To even remotely compare someone starting a company with $0 from the ground up vs. someone spending tens of billions of existing dollars as a non-profit and classify them as the same level of entrepreneur is an insult to anyone who has ever started a company.
• bena 7y ago
  As opposed to the platter Bill's father used to hand things to Bill? William Gates, III was already loaded. He took a leave of absence from Harvard to see if this software thing would work out, but his back up plan was to go back. I don't think anyone is going to dispute that Bill Gates didn't work hard or isn't intelligent. The man was doing graduate level work as an underclassman. But his risk for leaving Harvard and starting Microsoft was laughably low. And I think Bill would recognize the vast amount of privilege he's benefited from in his life. I mean, that's part of what the article is about.
• Djvacto 7y ago
  According to wikipedia's info on her early career, she graduated as a valedictorian, and holds multiple degrees from universities I would consider prestigious at a glance. She also conceivably had to work prior to retiring to start her family. Not sure why you're convinced she had everything handed to her?
• dahart 7y ago
  The irony of your comment is that the whole point of showing Melinda was to illustrate how she has it relatively easy, and how much more difficult the woman from Sahel has it. The gender part of that graph wasn’t trying to say Melinda herself has it very hard, it was only saying that Melinda is a woman, and statistically speaking on a global scale, being a woman is an obstacle. Both of those things are true, and the article discusses why.
  • seph-reed 7y ago
    > statistically speaking on a global scale, being a woman is an obstacle I think it's important to add the concept of "financial," "independence," or "power" somewhere in here. AFAICT, these are the only things that matter to people, so it's a pretty big deal to have your sex/gender be an obstacle towards them. But the overall equation of happiness has a bit more variables. Ultimately, I meet (on average) about the same amount of unhappy men as women, so from a happiness perspective it would appear that neither men nor women are winning and focusing on money and power instead of well-being is short sighted. Like maybe we should quit arguing which gender gets the most money and try to figure out what makes a human happy.
    • dahart 7y ago
      > maybe we should quit arguing which gender gets the most money and try to figure out what makes a human happy. That's a bit of a straw man, I didn't argue money primarily, and neither does the article. The article is talking about self-determinism, education, and opportunity for women, not money or power specifically. These things are all well known to be of primary importance to happiness. From the article: "the average woman spends more than four hours every day doing unpaid work. Men, by comparison, average just over one hour per day." How do you feel personally about doing unpaid labor? > I meet (on average) about the same amount of unhappy men as women, so from a happiness perspective it would appear that neither men nor women are winning and focusing on money and power instead of well-being is short sighted. That's purely anecdotal and has no bearing on what is happening in the world to people outside your class & geographical region. Drawing a global conclusion about gender inequality based on your personal experience is a pretty bad idea.
• deleted 7y ago
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• bargl 7y ago
  Every single success I have right now is due to my wife's support. She is my partner in everything. When I worked at a startup, she suffered. When I am successful in something it's because she's there sacrificing with me. The reason that Bill has a flat line in marriage is because of his relationship with his wife. Do you think he could have taken that hate without her support? Do you think she didn't feel awful because of the change it brought in her husband? An equal and supportive marriage means that every sacrifice is made together. Don't trivialize how much she took on even though she wasn't the "face" of the company. You're making marriage into a "competition" and it's not. It's two people working at a team, and no not every marriage is like that, my hope is that Bill and Melinda have that sort of marriage.
• jlg23 7y ago
  > saying that Melinda had to make more sacrifices to get where she is than Bill is laughable Unless you have actual insights into her life and personality that back up your statement, denying that she had to make more sacrifices could just as well be anything between ignorant, insensitive or plain mean.