Melinda French Gates Adjusts to a New, Solo Role

Ms. French Gates was half of one of the world’s wealthiest and most ambitious philanthropic couples for more than two decades. Now, following her divorce in 2021 from

Microsoft Corp.

co-founder

Bill Gates,

she’s embracing a new solo role.

A longtime advocate for women, she is digging in deeper to remove barriers that cause gender inequities in the U.S. and other countries that she says have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Ms. French Gates, who is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and runs her own company, Pivotal Ventures LLC, is committing more of her fortune, speaking out and urging other power players to join the cause. 

Helping women gain an equal footing is key to alleviating poverty, disease and other societal and economic ills, she says. Women in the U.S. spend two-plus hours more than men each day on unpaid household chores and caregiving—“hours they could spend taking a class, pushing for a promotion, or getting involved in politics,” she told the recently gathered group.  

“The more I speak my truth, the more I know it’s opening the way for other people to speak their truths,” Ms. French Gates said in an interview. Being on her own has led her to speak out more, she said. “Since the divorce, I just get more and more comfortable with it all the time.”

The Gates Foundation, which focused two decades ago on vaccines and other innovations to cure or eliminate diseases like HIV, malaria and polio, now also counts gender equality as a top priority. Ms. French Gates has been a driving force over the past several years behind foundation funding of programs that include providing women in developing countries access to digital bank accounts on their phones, making childbirth safer, and offering family-planning services.  

Ms. French Gates, 58, is part of a cohort of female billionaires, including MacKenzie Scott and Laurene Powell Jobs, who are reshaping philanthropy through the causes they are giving their fortunes to and the way they give. They’re parting with their wealth faster than some philanthropists traditionally have, often with fewer strings attached, and funding causes and groups that don’t normally attract the attention of major philanthropists. 

While philanthropists sometimes set up foundations to run in perpetuity, “the philosophy that more people are starting to embrace is, there will be other wealthy people to solve the problems for tomorrow; let us solve the problems today,” said

Helene Gayle,

president of Spelman College and a trustee at the Gates Foundation. 

These female philanthropists are leading change—and can do more to lead change, said Jamie Drummond, founder of Sharing Strategies, a network of advocates and organizations addressing global crises like Covid-19 and climate change that has received funding from the Gates Foundation. “The system is sometimes too slow to get resources out, too slow to support front-line groups, the real local actors who are doing heroic work,” and too timid to help persuade governments to think big, he said.

Donations to organizations focused on issues related to women and girls made up just 1.9% of overall charitable giving in the U.S. in 2019 at $7.9 billion, up from 1.6% in 2012, according to an analysis by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Some of the institute’s work has been funded by the Gates Foundation. 

Ms. French Gates may decide to leave the Gates Foundation in 2023 but a final decision hasn’t been reached, people familiar with the matter said. She and Mr. Gates agreed in their divorce that if either one of them decides after two years that they can no longer work together, Ms. French Gates would resign. Should that happen, Mr. Gates would give Ms. French Gates funds separate from the Gates Foundation’s endowment for her own philanthropic work. She has a current net worth of about $11 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

In late 2021 she published her own Giving Pledge, vowing to give the bulk of her fortune to a variety of philanthropic endeavors, including Pivotal, instead of just to the Gates Foundation. Mr. Gates, Ms. French Gates and Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge in 2010. Mr. Buffett resigned as Gates Foundation trustee in 2021.

Ms. French Gates said she is staying put for now at the Gates Foundation. “I continue to do that work there and will for the foreseeable future,” she said. 

Mark Suzman,

the Gates Foundation’s chief executive, said Ms. French Gates and Mr. Gates attend meetings jointly and are committed to the organization. “I don’t see it as a question mark,” he said.  

Pivotal, which has about 90 employees, has plowed hundreds of millions of dollars so far into more than 150 organizations. Those groups focus on areas including preparing women to run for political office and advocating for federal policy to provide access to paid family and medical leave. 

About 80% of the money Pivotal disbursed in 2022 went to philanthropic gifts, and roughly 20% went to venture investments, according to the company. 

Ms. French Gates said she’s moved the foundation to put more resources toward gender equality initiatives. The charitable foundation, which has given more than $65 billion in grants, committed $2.1 billion in 2021 to advance gender equality over five years. Its budget for gender-equality programs, which was $679 million in 2021, will increase in 2023, she said, pointing to recent strategy-review meetings. 

The Gates Foundation has a gender-equality division whose work includes improving child-care options in developing countries and other ways to remove barriers that hold women back from work and education. Other divisions of the foundation are also working on closing gender gaps, such as funding efforts to help women farmers connect with markets for their crops. 

A computer scientist by training who spent nine years at Microsoft, Ms. French Gates initially chose not to take a major public role after the Gates Foundation’s formal launch in 2000. Instead, she set strategy mostly behind the scenes, she recalled in her book “The Moment of Lift.” 

She decided to speak out in 2012, after hearing repeatedly from women in poorer countries that they wanted birth control, but couldn’t get it. The practicing Catholic publicly pledged to help them get access to contraceptives, a move that drew criticism from Catholic groups but also helped raise $2.6 billion to bring family-planning services to women in the world’s poorest countries.

Her new public stance led her to challenge her then-husband, Ms. French Gates wrote in her book. The two argued when Ms. French Gates wanted to write about family planning in the foundation’s 2013 annual letter. Mr. Gates had been writing the letters alone for several years, and family planning was on his list to address that year. “It got hot,” she wrote. “We both got angry.” They eventually agreed that she would write a piece on family planning, with the overall letter in Mr. Gates’s name. A spokesperson for Mr. Gates declined to comment.

By 2015, Ms. French Gates was a full co-author on the annual letters and had embraced a bigger goal: empowering women. She launched Pivotal in 2015, structuring it as a company instead of a charity, she said, so she would have “more tools in my toolbox, if you will, that I can use there and deploy very flexibly.” 

The Gates Foundation committed $80 million in 2016 to gather data on how much time women and girls spend on unpaid work and other issues, to help funders determine where needs are greatest. The foundation then formed a dedicated gender-equality division in 2020. 

In October 2019 Ms. French Gates also committed $1 billion over 10 years to gender equality through Pivotal. That same month, she and her advisers held calls with divorce lawyers to unwind her marriage to Mr. Gates. 

She uses data to zero in on underlying problems, said Ruth Kagia, a former World Bank and Kenyan government official who has worked with Ms. French Gates on gender-equality initiatives. “She spends time with the real people engaging on the issues,” Ms. Kagia said. 

One organization that receives funding from Pivotal is Reboot Representation Technology Coalition, a nonprofit that aims to double the number of Black, Latina and Native American women receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science and related fields by 2025. 

Grants from Pivotal cover the nonprofit’s operating costs, said Dwana Franklin-Davis, its CEO. Reboot Representation submits grant reports twice a year and shares updates and swaps ideas on better ways to support women in technology with Pivotal monthly, she said. “I don’t have to fundraise like many nonprofits have to,” she said. “I get to focus on how I can be strategic and collaborative.” 

Pivotal’s for-profit work includes an investment in Rethink Impact, a venture-capital firm that invests in companies led by women that develop technology to address caregiving, mental health and other crises. 

Pivotal made its funding model more flexible in 2020, when some of the organizations it funds ran into financial difficulty as the pandemic swept the globe. Pivotal usually gives multiyear grants, but it adjusted dozens of projects, for example providing surge funding or relaxing a timeline on a grant agreement, said Haven Ley, Pivotal’s managing director of program strategy and investment. Some of those revised models remain, she said. 

Both Ms. French Gates and Ms. Scott, the ex-wife of

Amazon.com Inc.

founder

Jeff Bezos,

have worked with philanthropy adviser Bridgespan Group, people familiar with the work said. Bridgespan has pushed for so-called unrestricted giving, allowing organizations to choose where money is spent, and what the group calls “big bets”: larger donations given as soon as possible. Bridgespan co-founder

Thomas J. Tierney

was also added last year to the Gates Foundation board.

Ms. French Gates is pushing for a U.S. federal program guaranteeing access to paid family and medical leave. She was one of the first funders, in 2019, for Paid Leave for All, a U.S. campaign of organizations working to get paid family and medical leave, said Dawn Huckelbridge, the campaign’s director.

Paid family and medical leave was passed by the House in 2021 but didn’t make it into a final legislative package signed into law in 2022. 

Ms. French Gates said she would continue to advocate for it. “It may be unflashy or unsexy or take a lot of time,” she said. “It’s too important to not stick with it and so I will.”

Write to Betsy McKay at [email protected] and Emily Glazer at [email protected]

Ms. French Gates was half of one of the world’s wealthiest and most ambitious philanthropic couples for more than two decades. Now, following her divorce in 2021 from

Microsoft Corp.

co-founder

Bill Gates,

she’s embracing a new solo role.

A longtime advocate for women, she is digging in deeper to remove barriers that cause gender inequities in the U.S. and other countries that she says have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Ms. French Gates, who is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and runs her own company, Pivotal Ventures LLC, is committing more of her fortune, speaking out and urging other power players to join the cause. 

Helping women gain an equal footing is key to alleviating poverty, disease and other societal and economic ills, she says. Women in the U.S. spend two-plus hours more than men each day on unpaid household chores and caregiving—“hours they could spend taking a class, pushing for a promotion, or getting involved in politics,” she told the recently gathered group.  

“The more I speak my truth, the more I know it’s opening the way for other people to speak their truths,” Ms. French Gates said in an interview. Being on her own has led her to speak out more, she said. “Since the divorce, I just get more and more comfortable with it all the time.”

The Gates Foundation, which focused two decades ago on vaccines and other innovations to cure or eliminate diseases like HIV, malaria and polio, now also counts gender equality as a top priority. Ms. French Gates has been a driving force over the past several years behind foundation funding of programs that include providing women in developing countries access to digital bank accounts on their phones, making childbirth safer, and offering family-planning services.  

Ms. French Gates, 58, is part of a cohort of female billionaires, including MacKenzie Scott and Laurene Powell Jobs, who are reshaping philanthropy through the causes they are giving their fortunes to and the way they give. They’re parting with their wealth faster than some philanthropists traditionally have, often with fewer strings attached, and funding causes and groups that don’t normally attract the attention of major philanthropists. 

While philanthropists sometimes set up foundations to run in perpetuity, “the philosophy that more people are starting to embrace is, there will be other wealthy people to solve the problems for tomorrow; let us solve the problems today,” said

Helene Gayle,

president of Spelman College and a trustee at the Gates Foundation. 

These female philanthropists are leading change—and can do more to lead change, said Jamie Drummond, founder of Sharing Strategies, a network of advocates and organizations addressing global crises like Covid-19 and climate change that has received funding from the Gates Foundation. “The system is sometimes too slow to get resources out, too slow to support front-line groups, the real local actors who are doing heroic work,” and too timid to help persuade governments to think big, he said.

Donations to organizations focused on issues related to women and girls made up just 1.9% of overall charitable giving in the U.S. in 2019 at $7.9 billion, up from 1.6% in 2012, according to an analysis by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Some of the institute’s work has been funded by the Gates Foundation. 

Ms. French Gates may decide to leave the Gates Foundation in 2023 but a final decision hasn’t been reached, people familiar with the matter said. She and Mr. Gates agreed in their divorce that if either one of them decides after two years that they can no longer work together, Ms. French Gates would resign. Should that happen, Mr. Gates would give Ms. French Gates funds separate from the Gates Foundation’s endowment for her own philanthropic work. She has a current net worth of about $11 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

In late 2021 she published her own Giving Pledge, vowing to give the bulk of her fortune to a variety of philanthropic endeavors, including Pivotal, instead of just to the Gates Foundation. Mr. Gates, Ms. French Gates and Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge in 2010. Mr. Buffett resigned as Gates Foundation trustee in 2021.

Ms. French Gates said she is staying put for now at the Gates Foundation. “I continue to do that work there and will for the foreseeable future,” she said. 

Mark Suzman,

the Gates Foundation’s chief executive, said Ms. French Gates and Mr. Gates attend meetings jointly and are committed to the organization. “I don’t see it as a question mark,” he said.  

Pivotal, which has about 90 employees, has plowed hundreds of millions of dollars so far into more than 150 organizations. Those groups focus on areas including preparing women to run for political office and advocating for federal policy to provide access to paid family and medical leave. 

About 80% of the money Pivotal disbursed in 2022 went to philanthropic gifts, and roughly 20% went to venture investments, according to the company. 

Ms. French Gates said she’s moved the foundation to put more resources toward gender equality initiatives. The charitable foundation, which has given more than $65 billion in grants, committed $2.1 billion in 2021 to advance gender equality over five years. Its budget for gender-equality programs, which was $679 million in 2021, will increase in 2023, she said, pointing to recent strategy-review meetings. 

The Gates Foundation has a gender-equality division whose work includes improving child-care options in developing countries and other ways to remove barriers that hold women back from work and education. Other divisions of the foundation are also working on closing gender gaps, such as funding efforts to help women farmers connect with markets for their crops. 

A computer scientist by training who spent nine years at Microsoft, Ms. French Gates initially chose not to take a major public role after the Gates Foundation’s formal launch in 2000. Instead, she set strategy mostly behind the scenes, she recalled in her book “The Moment of Lift.” 

She decided to speak out in 2012, after hearing repeatedly from women in poorer countries that they wanted birth control, but couldn’t get it. The practicing Catholic publicly pledged to help them get access to contraceptives, a move that drew criticism from Catholic groups but also helped raise $2.6 billion to bring family-planning services to women in the world’s poorest countries.

Her new public stance led her to challenge her then-husband, Ms. French Gates wrote in her book. The two argued when Ms. French Gates wanted to write about family planning in the foundation’s 2013 annual letter. Mr. Gates had been writing the letters alone for several years, and family planning was on his list to address that year. “It got hot,” she wrote. “We both got angry.” They eventually agreed that she would write a piece on family planning, with the overall letter in Mr. Gates’s name. A spokesperson for Mr. Gates declined to comment.

By 2015, Ms. French Gates was a full co-author on the annual letters and had embraced a bigger goal: empowering women. She launched Pivotal in 2015, structuring it as a company instead of a charity, she said, so she would have “more tools in my toolbox, if you will, that I can use there and deploy very flexibly.” 

The Gates Foundation committed $80 million in 2016 to gather data on how much time women and girls spend on unpaid work and other issues, to help funders determine where needs are greatest. The foundation then formed a dedicated gender-equality division in 2020. 

In October 2019 Ms. French Gates also committed $1 billion over 10 years to gender equality through Pivotal. That same month, she and her advisers held calls with divorce lawyers to unwind her marriage to Mr. Gates. 

She uses data to zero in on underlying problems, said Ruth Kagia, a former World Bank and Kenyan government official who has worked with Ms. French Gates on gender-equality initiatives. “She spends time with the real people engaging on the issues,” Ms. Kagia said. 

One organization that receives funding from Pivotal is Reboot Representation Technology Coalition, a nonprofit that aims to double the number of Black, Latina and Native American women receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science and related fields by 2025. 

Grants from Pivotal cover the nonprofit’s operating costs, said Dwana Franklin-Davis, its CEO. Reboot Representation submits grant reports twice a year and shares updates and swaps ideas on better ways to support women in technology with Pivotal monthly, she said. “I don’t have to fundraise like many nonprofits have to,” she said. “I get to focus on how I can be strategic and collaborative.” 

Pivotal’s for-profit work includes an investment in Rethink Impact, a venture-capital firm that invests in companies led by women that develop technology to address caregiving, mental health and other crises. 

Pivotal made its funding model more flexible in 2020, when some of the organizations it funds ran into financial difficulty as the pandemic swept the globe. Pivotal usually gives multiyear grants, but it adjusted dozens of projects, for example providing surge funding or relaxing a timeline on a grant agreement, said Haven Ley, Pivotal’s managing director of program strategy and investment. Some of those revised models remain, she said. 

Both Ms. French Gates and Ms. Scott, the ex-wife of

Amazon.com Inc.

founder

Jeff Bezos,

have worked with philanthropy adviser Bridgespan Group, people familiar with the work said. Bridgespan has pushed for so-called unrestricted giving, allowing organizations to choose where money is spent, and what the group calls “big bets”: larger donations given as soon as possible. Bridgespan co-founder

Thomas J. Tierney

was also added last year to the Gates Foundation board.

Ms. French Gates is pushing for a U.S. federal program guaranteeing access to paid family and medical leave. She was one of the first funders, in 2019, for Paid Leave for All, a U.S. campaign of organizations working to get paid family and medical leave, said Dawn Huckelbridge, the campaign’s director.

Paid family and medical leave was passed by the House in 2021 but didn’t make it into a final legislative package signed into law in 2022. 

Ms. French Gates said she would continue to advocate for it. “It may be unflashy or unsexy or take a lot of time,” she said. “It’s too important to not stick with it and so I will.”

Write to Betsy McKay at [email protected] and Emily Glazer at [email protected]