Take time to learn about the lives of women around the world-and try to play a small part in their fight to create the future they deserve.

Even in decision-making, we work in self-help groups. That is women coming together in small groups of 10 to sometimes 15 women, where they start to get education about their rights, about clean water and sanitation, about how to have a healthy birth. You can bring in all kinds of education to them that way.

When we better understand the realities of these women's lives, we are able to design and deliver solutions that are more useful to them.

I am inspired by the women I meet everywhere I go. They have to work so hard just to make sure their families survive, but somehow they stay optimistic and do everything in their power to make the future better than the past.

Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.

Women and girls should be able to determine their own future, no matter where they're born.

I went to business school, and I went straight from that to a nine-year career at Microsoft. Eventually, I ran a big chunk of the consumer products division for Microsoft.Then I left with the birth of our first daughter because Bill and I both wanted to have a few kids.