The 10,000 Paper Cuts That Teach Women Not to Trust Themselves, with Melinda French Gates

About this episode

Melinda French Gates has run some of the most powerful rooms in the world. She co-founded and co-chaired the Gates Foundation. She's sat across from heads of state. And in her 40s, at the top of her career, she started doubting herself in meetings she'd run a hundred times before. She talks to Dr. Becky about why: chronic insomnia; undiagnosed perimenopause; a body that had learned, years earlier, to override its own signals, first in a male-dominated work culture, then in a college relationship that taught her not to trust her own read on things. They get into a Gallup survey Melinda’s organization Pivotal Ventures ran this year of 5,000 adults, where half the respondents who'd been pregnant said they struggled with their mental health during or after it. And they talk about what Melinda calls the "10,000 paper cuts": the small, repeated moments, a comment talked over in a meeting, a doctor who doesn't quite listen, that teach women to stop trusting their own gut long before anyone tells them to, directly, all at once. Becky and Melinda work out what actually rebuilds that trust, in doctors' offices and living rooms alike. Plus: what Melinda's granddaughters are teaching her ab