Thoroughly inspiring and relevant. I am glad to have gotten a peek of Melinda Gates’ mind. She is brilliant and compassionate and an inspiration.

Wonderful Melinda Gates weaves in touching stories with insightful facts in a narrative that delights and surprises. This is a keeper.

A surprising and insightful retelling of the person struggles, decisions, and achievements that Melinda Gates faced before and during her leadership of the Gates foundation. Great as an audiobook.

I loved this book and will probably reread it. I learned so much and have a new appreciation for Melinda and Bill Gates. This should be required reading in schools.

A powerful, compelling story of Melinda Gates and her engagement in gender equality. Melinda by herself is a very accomplished woman so her story is interesting, but the anecdotes of people she meets in her travels is what moved me. These stories of the poor, ordinary women is bound to evoke a reaction, makes you realize what women endure in places you may not know of. A must read for 2019.

Going into this book I didn't know much about Melinda Gates, or what her foundation did. All overly wealthy people seem to have foundations, so my base assumption would have been that they used it to distribute money to programs and people in need. Boy was I wrong on that. This book is a must read for anyone, no matter your sex/gender/lot in life, it's eye opening and empowering. While the title will lead you to believe that the target audience for this book is women, and that reading it will leave women empowered, that couldn't be further from the truth. Melinda tells the story about her journey in empowering women and how it cascaded into changing the views/lives of men and women around the globe. From America to India, and every village in between, she shares stories of people that she admires, and how one idea led to large scale social change for many. I adore Melinda's take on how to solve problems, and listen with the intent to understand. Each time she thinks she has a handle on a small problem, she discovers a much bigger picture that needs to be addressed. She is humble, and open to to understanding life from a different perspective. It's inspiring. The way she was able to continually tie so much back to family planning shocked me, but also made complete sense. “…contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.” “When women can decide whether and when to have children, it saves lives, promotes health, expands education, and creates prosperity—no matter what country in the world you’re talking about.” The story she is telling is laid out in a manner that makes it easy to follow and understand how she is who she is today. From her personal family background, to her struggles with the boys club. It was cool to listen to how she became a more confident and assertive version of herself and spread her own wings of empowerment. So often people brush off items that aren't their problem, as "since I don't struggle with this, no one is anymore. It's history, a problem that has been solved." But that isn't true. Melinda points out so many areas that we are still working as a society to make better. I leave this book with a new understanding of her foundation, and how much just listening can blossom a wave of change. I encourage you to read it. The audiobook was great, as she narrates it, and puts the emphasis in all the right places. “And the starting point for human improvement is empathy. Everything flows from that. Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That’s how we gain a common base of knowledge. When people can’t agree, it’s often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared experience. If you feel what others feel, you’re more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand one another. Then you can move to the honest and respectful exchange of ideas that is the mark of a successful partnership. That’s the source of progress.”

Before listening to this audiobook I knew very little about Melinda Gates, a private person by nature who has been taking on a larger (and more equal) role in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this author-read book, she details the evolution of the Foundation’s mission and scope with stories from all the people she’s met along the way: other professionals and leaders and, most poignantly, the women and children on the margins of society who have become the focus of the Foundation’s work. There’s also a bit of background on her as a person, her parents and upbringing (how she almost went to work for IBM instead of Microsoft), how she and Bill met, married and even their struggles to be more equal partners. I am very glad to have listened to this book and very glad to have Melinda Gates stepping up her public persona and, in her thoughtful and grounded approach, bringing more good into the world.

This should be required reading for all high school students. Period.

I loved this book! I thought it was so informative and I really enjoyed experiencing her learning process. Gates explores lots of issues women and girls are facing around the world. She talks about how her philanthropic endeavour aims to build up women in different communities. She herself travels to different parts of the world to engage with the communities she wants to help. While this could have easily taken a ‘white saviour’ turn, I really didn’t feel that from her book. She brought up a very important point: you cannot change the culture of a community and you cannot just come in and change something without engaging with the community and asking them what they need. I enjoyed her dialogue on family planning and how she received a lot of negativity from privileged Christian communities in America for promoting contraception in rural and poorer communities. She also mentioned that while this was something positive in a community, it was not the main issue that women and girls wanted to be solved and so she had to learn how to listen and respond to the actual needs of the communities.

Fantastic, enlightening, and uplifting.

Melinda tells not only her story but brings others into the light with her. This book doesn’t just teach you about women empowerment- but about life empowerment. Do yourself a favour and read this book with an open mind. I think you’ll be surprised how much there is to learn when you really listen.

3.5/5

Simply a wonderful book. This isn't to say the book was easy to read. Emotionally, the stories that Gates shares will break your heart multiple times, but I think that the book is an important read. It filled me with a conviction that there is so much work left to do, but that we can indeed address the various inequities between women and men in our world. She definitely convinced me that empowering women is perhaps the single most important goal we could be striving for, at least in terms of humanity's flourishing. Read this book.