Melinda Gates: It hasn’t been welcoming to women now for more than a decade. So it’s something that’s actually been going on for a long time and I don’t think you see it being worked on in a systemic way and I think it needs to be worked on in a systemic way. If that doesn’t get reversed, you’re not going to have young women wanting to go into the field.

White: So why choose this moment to weigh in?

Gates: I’ve always been concerned about this. I think about where we’re going to go with computer science, where we’re going to go with technology. I see machine learning and what it’s doing in different sectors and I start to project forward and I say: Oh my gosh, if today, only 18 percent of computer-science graduates are women and we’re not on a significant rise, think about what that’s going to mean for the future. It’s not good for now for the products we’re designing, it’s a disaster in terms of artificial intelligence. We have to be out doing everything we can to get more women into computer science.

White: What’s at risk if more women don’t get incorporated into computer science and tech?

Gates: I think we’ll have so much hidden bias coded into the system that we won’t even realize all the places that we have it. If you don’t have a diverse workforce programming artificial intelligence and thinking about the data sets to feed in, and how to look at a particular program, you’re going to have so much bias in the system, you’re going to have a hard time rolling it back later or taking it out.

White: As a computer-science major in the 1980s, how did you see the field?

Gates: When I was studying computer science at Duke University, I saw freshman year there were quite a few women in computer science, maybe a third. But by my sophomore year, there were a handful of us. And then there was a handful that persisted. And I didn’t actually mind that, because I was programming with male teams and I was used to that and I had good friends in computer science. When I was in college we thought, just like medicine and law, we’re on the way up—there’ll be more and more of us. But to come out of Microsoft 10 years later and look at the statistics and realize that even then they were headed down—it was just baffling to me.

White: Did you have an experiences at Microsoft that made you understand why women would leave, or that made you want to leave?

Gates: I would say this about working at Microsoft: First of all, I loved it, I loved the products we were working on, I loved the fast paced nature of it. I didn’t always love the caustic nature of it. After about two years there I did think about leaving. I thought, I’m just not sure that it feels like the kind of environment day in and day out that I want. Then I decided that I’ll just be myself for a while and see if that works. And I started to learn that being myself could work. By then, I was a manager and I ended up inadvertently attracting huge teams around me who wanted to act in the same way. And people would even say to me, “How in the world did you recruit that amazing programmer to one of your teams?” and I would say, well I think they just want to work in this type of environment.