Giving Compass' Take:

• Melinda Gates is imploring tech companies to help increase wireless access and invest in programs that will help developing countries. 

• How will the increase in CSR initiatives help push more tech companies to get involved with socially driven missions?

• Read about Melinda Gates' coalition to get more women of color in tech. 

Melinda Gates called for big technology companies to do more to help the world’s poor by investing in wireless access and other projects that can help raise living standards for workers in developing countries.

“What we can do is put some pressure on them to do things for the poor and do things for everyone,” Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the couple’s philanthropic organization, said in an interview. “We can bring some incentive to those technology companies to do the right thing, to pull everyone into the market."

Gates’ remarks come at a time when online giants are under increased social and political pressure to do more to counter income disparity between top executives and rank-and-file workers.

Gates declined to comment on whether tech companies as large as Google or Amazon should be broken up. But she said policymakers should create incentives for tech companies to help people in low-income countries, not just rich nations.

Two decades after Microsoft battled to counter the perception that its growth was getting out of control, tech companies such as Facebook Inc. and Amazon are facing similar questions about their role in society. In a wide-ranging interview, Gates pushed back against the notion that technology is a social liability.

“Technology is really just a tool. We can use it for good in the world, or we could use it for evil," Gates said.

Read the full article about tech companies doing good by Sarah Foster and Andrew Mayeda at Bloomberg