In 2021, the Gates Foundation released a strategic plan to deliver on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). It included a batch of three-year goals: not endpoints, but checkpoints along a much longer path. Today, we are a little more than halfway to our deadline for those goals, and on July 11, 2023, we published a report updating our progress.
When I read the report, I was especially struck by the way that Leslie Mays, our chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, framed the challenge we face in the introduction she wrote. Meeting our goals, she said, “calls for a delicate balance between patience and urgency.”
First, urgency. Until we embed DEI in all our systems and structures, we will fall short of the principles that have guided this foundation for more than 20 years. Nothing could be more urgent than taking immediate steps to live our values in everything we do.
The report details some of those steps. For example, we expanded the team that’s leading DEI work across the foundation. Today, almost every division and regional and country office has a customized plan owned by division leadership and a DEI lead coordinating its implementation. And all senior leaders at the foundation, including me, have engaged in a 10-month learning journey focused on increasing inclusive leadership skills and fostering accountability.
Many of these actions have already yielded results. In the United States, we increased our spending on vendor partners from historically underrepresented groups by 22% in 2022. Almost half of the Agricultural Development program’s new grants in 2022 went to proximal partners (partners located in the communities we serve), up from 25% in 2020. And over the past four years, the Maternal, Newborn, Child Nutrition & Health team quadrupled the share of its investments going to organizations headquartered in Africa or Asia.
All of these data points show that we’re doing better than before, but we’re not nearly where we need to be.
In fact, “better than before, but not where we need to be” is an accurate way to describe most of the results we’ve seen so far. We’ve improved many of our processes, but we have not yet achieved most of our goals. For example, we haven’t seen enough growth in the number of grants we give to partners outside the United States and Western Europe. Women hold more than half of our leadership roles, but they are still underrepresented when you consider the makeup of the foundation. And employees have clearly told us we have room to improve our performance assessment system to ensure that it is fair and consistent for all.
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In this context—better than before, but not nearly where we need to be—where does patience come in? I want to be clear: Patience doesn’t mean accepting the status quo. This report makes clear that we still have a long way to go to build a workforce and partnerships that are representative of the communities we serve—a mandate we take seriously.
For me, patience is really a philosophy about how change happens. We’re taking action now, but we know that the most important results aren’t going to come quickly. Patience is about identifying problems, taking steps to fix them, measuring interim results and making adjustments, and keeping DEI at the top of the agenda until—and long after—we have achieved our goals.
In my earlier posts on the foundation’s DEI journey, I wrote that we were still in the early stages. That is no longer true. We are well on our way. We are facing the challenge. The report’s findings reveal an obstinate truth—that it’s easier to make a commitment than to keep it. But we are working every day to live up to the promises we made, and to the values we hold.
