In Cape Town in mid-November, Glamour editor in chief Samantha Barry sat down with Amal Clooney, Melinda French Gates, and Michelle Obama to discuss uniting their charitable organizations to end child marriage, and how their unique partnership—and newfound friendship—bloomed.
Samantha Barry: I want to delve into Malawi and the purpose of this trip. But first, I want to talk about friendship. One of my favorite quotes about female friendships is by you, Michelle. “Friendships between women, as many women will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses…swapped back and forth and over again.” Tell me about your friendship with these women.
Michelle Obama: The other thing I read about friendship is that it requires a level of bravery because you have to reach out and—
Amal Clooney: She just physically reached out to stop me from falling five minutes ago.
Melinda French Gates: Thank goodness!
Obama: But I think that’s where it began. We’ve all encountered each other in different ways, but Melinda and I were like, “We should talk. We should meet. We should hear about what we each are doing”—and the same thing with Amal. These two are amazing powerhouses that are doing important things in the world on behalf of gender equality. It seemed natural for us to come together, and from that a friendship has blossomed. I think we understand each other’s unique issues and challenges. We’re on the other end of motherhood. Amal is—
Clooney: They’re giving lots of parenting advice.
French Gates: Probably more than she wants, actually. She’s got this totally.
Obama: This friendship was born out of three women going, “I want to open up myself to you and let you in.” One of the things I remind women generally is that you’re never too old to make new friends, but it starts with your willingness to be vulnerable. We’ve each been vulnerable with each other, not just on our work, but in other parts of our lives, and from that, you grow a joint heart, a joint heartbeat, a joint rhythm, and it just makes working together that much more meaningful, at least for me.
Barry: Give me some insight into that. I can imagine a dinner conversation with you three amazing women is pretty fascinating. How do you come together and say, “This is the issue, we want to combine our forces, each of us individually with so much influence and power and knowledge, but this is the one issue”?
French Gates: As we started to get to know each other—you two were friends before I was part of this threesome, then they invited me out to dinner. It was so warm and easy.
There was a lot of mutual respect for our work, and then as we can each imagine our own areas; in a certain way, one plus one plus one becomes five.
We were in Malawi for the last two days. It’s clear that with child marriage, you have to work at the grassroots level and all the way up through the legal system. So Amal’s working almost top down in some ways. [Michelle is] supporting in education with the after-school programs. We’re approaching it bottoms up, and we’re all collecting data. Our work meshes together, and you don’t always see that with traveling partners on this kind of work, but it comes pretty easily and naturally.
Clooney: For me, both Michelle and Melinda have been women whom I’ve long admired from afar, and it’s been such a privilege to be able to get to know them. The work we can do together can be so impactful. As you say, Melinda, because each person is approaching the same subject from a different lens, but actually, you need all of them. You need education; you need health. We’ve seen just with all the girls we’ve met, how interconnected these issues are and how much more we can achieve by doing it together, but also it’s fun.
It’s been really fun traveling together, and the conversation meanders between global issues to our kids and gossip occasionally, as is pretty typical for female friendships.
Obama: We talked the entire plane ride, literally from Malawi to Cape Town. The entire time. We threatened taking naps, but it didn’t happen.
Clooney: I was very awake.
French Gates: Michelle was nice enough to know that if any one of us needed to take a break like me, we could, because I’m a little bit more of an introvert, but that never happened because the conversation just kept flowing.
Barry: So you’re the introvert, I think, sandwiched between two extroverts. Would that be right in saying?
Clooney: I think we brought out the extrovert in Melinda. I think I’m probably more on the extrovert side.
Barry: I had the pleasure of being in Malawi. What were the big takeaway moments for you, Michelle, on this trip, or the people that really touched you?
Obama: It’s the promise and possibility. You saw it. Those girls are powerhouses. They are bold, brave, smart, resilient. These girls are fighting, literally fighting for their lives, and still able to bring such joy and energy. You can hear their stories, but you don’t see it on their faces. They haven’t let their trauma break them down. That’s part of what I want seen as we do these travels. I want the community out there to understand who these girls are, to see them in their spirits and their enthusiasm and their thirst.
I want girls in America to see this because most children, most girls in the United States, have schools to go to. These girls are fighting tooth and nail to occupy the few seats that are there, leaving their homes, walking for miles and miles and miles. So that’s what I take away every time I’m with them. They break my heart in all the right ways. They just go into my chest and grab my heart and pull it out, and they make me want to fight for them.
Barry: Melinda, when you think about the problem and the scale of child marriage, does it ever feel overwhelming or too big—that it feels too much to tackle?
French Gates: It feels really hard. That’s the truth. But you have to look for points of light and then you have to see where there is scale change. I often go back to other countries, Michelle brought this up very eloquently about South Korea. It was an aid recipient and now it gives aid. That change can happen in one generation, so when I see this grassroots work going on—Malawi’s actually made progress.
Barry: Talking about daunting numbers, it’s expected that child marriage won’t end for 300 years. What does impact look like?
French Gates: We’re going to change that. That’s not going to happen.
Clooney: As Melinda said, you can look at the statistics and they are daunting. Whether it’s child marriage or gender-based violence or lack of access to education—but I teach at law school and I say to the students, “You can either bury your head in the sand or you can have actionable anger.” The real issue is when you don’t have anger and when you just have apathy and cynicism, and that’s what I see in many corridors of power, unfortunately. So if governments aren’t going to be the ones to accelerate change, then philanthropists can do it and lawyers can do it, and we have to try and bring in the relevant communities.
One of the messages we put out at the law clinic in Malawi is to say to families, “This isn’t just about one girl. You’re sending girls into child marriage because of poverty, but if you want to break out of poverty, you need to send the girls to school. And there’s data showing that if you unshackle half of the population in each country, unsurprisingly, you’re going to add trillions to the economy.” So I think we need to convince more people to care about this issue, and if we can get enough people involved, we will accelerate the pace of change. But we won’t if people just sit back and think, Somebody else is going to do it, or, It’s not urgent, or, It’s not my issue. It’s clearly everyone’s issue.
And who knows? Out of all of these girls, who would be developing cures for cancer or helping us navigate AI or breaking these awful cycles of violence that we see all over the world? I hope that one of the things that we can achieve by joining forces—and by the way, it’s crazy how rare it is for people to join forces in the human rights space even when they’re working on similar issues. So I hope this also sets that kind of example.
Barry: I got so excited about the fact that you three were coming together because it is unusual for people with your individual spotlights, with your individual influence, to want to share that or come together or collaborate. Why do you think there’s not more of this?
Clooney: Honestly, I find it completely perplexing. I work on all these different conflict situations, and even when the victims are from sometimes the same community, or they’re all victims of genocide, you would think that would unite them more than anything else. You don’t always see cooperation, but sometimes you just have to zoom out, and by connecting the dots, there’s so much more that we can achieve.
Obama: I think we can’t underestimate the amount of fatigue there is, even at the highest levels of people who are working on these big and challenging issues. Like Amal said, people are just drilling down sometimes. They feel alone. That’s one of the reasons why, at the Obama Presidential Center, we focus on convening people, getting them in a room. To work together, you have to know each other.
Clooney: We’re even connecting our respective fellows. So the Clooney Foundation has fellows who are early-career women who want to do human rights work but can’t afford it or can’t see a path to do that. The Obama Foundation has next-generation leaders. So now we’re connecting them to one another and we’re doing joint programming, and even just simple things like that don’t normally happen among these kinds of organizations, so it’s great.
French Gates: I want to add one thing too. The gender space has been starved for resources for all of time. So people tend to fund things…even in the US, we fund men's health at the NIH [National Institutes of Health]. We don't fund women's health. So it takes women and like-minded men to get the right things on the agenda because these issues have been left behind and aren't seen by society because we don't value women and girls.
Barry: How do you call in the men in your own life to be part of this fight?
Obama: Well, I think I’m fortunate to have a man that's already called. I don't have to call him in. I'm married to a man who is trapped in a life full of women—very loud, strong, vocal women. So we have our allies in men. We just need more of them and we need all of them to take ownership. Many men in this generation are raising their daughters to be leaders. The opportunities are opening up. They’re looking at their little girls when they’re young, saying, “You can be anything.” My question to them is: Are you building a world that is really ready for the leaders you are building now? And I would answer that question and say no, it is not.
Not in your boardrooms or your C-suites or in your houses of parliaments or in your Congress. There is misogyny all over the world. The world isn’t structured for women’s dreams. So I remind men that if you don’t get this right and join in this struggle, that little girl that you love, you are going to raise her up and she’s going to look at you when she gets there and she’s going to say, “What happened, Dad? You sold me a bill of goods because you didn’t create the world that you trained me to want to be in,” and that’s how I want men to think. I want them to understand that we together have to create the world that we want our children, our girls to grow up in. And it’s got to be one that is full of opportunities and is safe for them to be in, and we’re not there yet. The world is not safe for women and girls, and that should hurt us all. That’s going to cut off the opportunities of my daughters, who are highly resourced, because there are things I don’t want them to do. There are places they will not see because it’s not safe for them, and that’s a shame. That will stunt them.
Barry: You talked about your daughters. Amal, you have young twins. Have you had this discussion about child marriage and what it looks like globally for them, for little girls around the world who are not as fortunate as your children?
Clooney: It’s really striking in our house because we have twins, and one’s a boy and one’s a girl. When I read stories to them about how women haven’t always had the right to vote, they agree that it’s crazy. They’re still only six so when I have to leave to work on this issue, they’re like, “But why do you have to leave?” They care, but they’d still rather have their mom at home. But I’m very lucky; like Michelle, I have a partner who couldn’t be more supportive. In my bag, on my way here, there was a note saying, “I’m so proud of what you guys are all doing.” My first trip as a working mom after having kids, George said, “I’ve got this. You go. I’m driving them to school.” That makes things so much easier for me, but obviously, we’re here because so many girls aren’t as lucky.
I was born in a war zone, but I became educated because I was taken abroad as a refugee. I got to choose who I marry and to wait until I was in my late 30s, which seemed so old to them, but many girls are not so lucky. And we want to play our part in making sure that more and more girls can have that freedom and that opportunity. So I hope we’ll succeed.
Barry: What does success look like and true impact? You’re seeing the impact on the ground in Cape Town, in Malawi, conversations in advocacy and awareness, but is there an ideal situation for you with this partnership?
French Gates: Well, I hope for the three of us it’s the beginning of a partnership. Usually, when you’re working on things, you tend to expand your scope over time. So I think we still have space to dream beyond this original three-year partnership. For me, it is child marriage, absolutely, but it’s also girls’ education. It’s girls having contraceptives so they can plan and space the births of their children.
What allowed women in the United States to grow in the workforce? The invention of the birth control pill, and women are crying out for it on this planet. They’re telling us they know about it, they want it, it’s stocked in and then it’s stocked out. So giving women access to make full choices about their reproductive health, getting a good education, and having economic opportunity. For me, in my lifetime, that’s what I hope to see, and that, in turn then, we will get far more women in parliaments who truly use their voice. More women in leadership roles because they move resources and make decisions. More women in all fields. We need far more women in technology and AI because that’s changing our society. For me, I look out over the long haul and say it’s a lifetime dream to just get women up to these critical levels where you then make a tipping point in these key places of decision-making and shaping society.
Barry: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I grew up in Ireland, where the pill wasn’t available until the ’90s. So it’s actually crazy to even think that a generation ago and how it’s changed. You guys have such accolades behind you. You’re authors, you have been in the rooms in seats of power from the White House to the Hague to the UN. What is the one word that people describe you as that just gives you pure joy? I’ll start with you, Michelle.
Obama: A mother, particularly a mother to two beautiful young women right now. I am ambitious, I’m an advocate, I care, I’m a hard worker, I’m strategic. But my greatest achievement is raising two sane young women who are compassionate and empathetic and aware.
French Gates: Same. I always wanted to be a mom. In fact, so much so that my parents, they struggled to put me and my three siblings through college, but as I was finishing my MBA program and leaving to go off, they were standing on the front porch and they said, “Don’t forget, you can still be a mom,” and I was like, and I want to be a mom, but I wanted to be a working mom. So I would say a mother first, then I would say advocate. Advocate for the girls and women who will come behind me in the next generations.
Barry: Amal.
Clooney: Well, now if I don’t say being a mom, they’ll watch this one day. I would say the greatest compliment would be if we can inspire someone younger. Whether it’s our own children or, for me, students or young lawyers. If we can inspire them to be empathetic, to be kind, to care about other people, and to try to be part of the solution to some of these problems. To try and move the needle in the right direction, then I think that’s a great contribution.
