Feminist activist Marie Shear famously wrote that “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” This axiom also summarizes Melinda French Gates’s commitment to women, as evidenced by her recent pledge of $1 billion over the next two years to organizations advancing women’s rights and gender equity and the $12.5 billion now at her discretion following her official separation last week from the Gates Foundation.
In her 2019 book, “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World,” French Gates wrote, “Women and men should all work together to take down the barriers … that hold women back.” The intractable challenge of feminism is that the barriers in question are incentives in our society and economy that extract much unpaid and underpaid labor from women. The brass tacks of women’s autonomy — our full personhood — are economic: We need new structures for providing and compensating work shunted off onto women.
Those structures will cost money. The question is, will $12.5 billion be enough to make a tangible difference? Here are some ways French Gates could move the needle in her next act as a philanthropist.
Commitment to Caregiving
French Gates should start by doubling down on her commitment to building caregiving infrastructure. This has multiple facets. The United States remains the only wealthy nation without federally guaranteed paid family leave. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already-strained child care economy in which availability is well below demand. When it is available, child care is often prohibitively expensive, averaging 33 percent of median household income.
At the other end of the life cycle, elder care options are both scarce and unaffordable. Lack of Medicare coverage for long-term care, combined with labor shortages in home health care and geriatricians, shifts responsibility to family members, “usually female,” to care for aging people.
The estimated annual value of women’s unpaid caregiving is more than twice that of men. The gap in our social safety net limits women’s options in many ways: Workers in the care sector are underpaid, while women caring for children and other family members lose earnings as well as their autonomy.
Changing this picture will mostly need to happen upstream of philanthropy. Consider that federal relief funding during the pandemic for the child care industry was $52 billion, more than four times Melinda French Gates’s endowment. However, French Gates could have a major impact through a combination of advocacy and direct service programs that would help alleviate the immediate crisis, create a precedent for states to improve their own systems, and strengthen the case for sustainable government support.
The obstacles to building care infrastructure are threefold: The work is done largely by women, it sustains life rather than generating profit, and, if professionally staffed, it should have high labor costs. French Gates has a chance to show leadership in how we value and compensate the work of care providers.
She could start by putting some facts on the ground by developing and providing long-term funding for a network of care centers. A single high-quality child care center costs an estimated $1 million annually, adjusted for inflation. Staffing is the biggest challenge, especially when centers want to maintain a high caregiver ratio. If French Gates wants to ensure these centers succeed, she could build in a high minimum wage, mandate that all employees be eligible for benefits, and even offer recruiting and retention bonuses.
A commitment of $1 billion could launch a nationwide network of flagship care centers over the next 10 years — at least one in every state with mandated full-time or benefits-eligible employment for all workers.
To demonstrate the value of quality centers of this kind, French Gates could also fund longitudinal studies on the effects of government-funded child care on early childhood development, school readiness, and workplace participation. This could help build consensus for further expansion.
The care crisis needs aggressive intervention both on the ground and at the policy level. It’s hard to sustain a policy effort when caregivers are consumed by their responsibilities and their efforts are so often invisible and taken for granted. That’s why French Gates’s ramped-up support for groups such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance and MomsRising is so important.
French Gates can be the accelerator this movement needs if she is willing to move quickly on a blended strategy that combines addressing immediate care needs while also funding research and advocacy. If the flagship centers succeed over the medium- and long-term, they will demonstrate economic benefits at the local and state levels and create broader consensus for electoral and policy change.
Focus on Reproductive Rights
French Gates’s first $1 billion tranche includes a major emphasis on reproductive rights, with a $200 million commitment in the United States through organizations such as the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Women’s Law Center. Here, too, there is a balance to strike between advocacy for policy change — likely at the state level, following the Dobbs decision — and funding that helps women access reproductive health care in the immediate term.
French Gates could fund fellowships for Ob-Gyns willing to serve in rural areas, for clinics on borders of states with restrictive abortion laws, and for legal defense and security measures to ensure the safety of both providers and patients.
An open question for French Gates is the extent to which her funding will address trans women’s needs in areas such as health care access, legal rights, and employment discrimination. She has a tremendous opportunity to amplify trans women’s status as women by specifying their inclusion among her giving priorities.
Under the Radar Issues
Finally, French Gates’s billions could materially benefit women and girls in a few under-the-radar areas, including the development of family-friendly community spaces and the creation of new narratives about women’s lives.
Author KC Davis recently went viral with her video explanation about the lack of safe and comfortable places designed for children, such as libraries, parks, and community centers. “Parents and children are not meant to have only each other,” she noted.
The loss of “third spaces” through, for example, budget cuts that reduce library hours has large-scale ramifications, including increased loneliness and isolation. By rebuilding those spaces, French Gates could help more families flourish.
French Gates should also consider investing in the creation of cultural narratives about women that thread the needle between the outdated “girlboss” ideal and the ascendant “trad wife” trend, which encourages young women to enjoy tending to home and family in lieu of professional ambition.
Breaking through right-wing messaging and shifting cultural perceptions about women’s roles will require significant funding of media campaigns, content creators, and digital strategy. This work is critical at a time when algorithms are pushing more young men into deeply misogynistic corners of the internet. Countering these trends will require sustained support for compelling stories on the digital platforms that shape their ideas and values about women.
Ideas are the foundation of long-term justice — just ask the conservative funders who supported decades of research and education in right-wing economic ideology and successful efforts to roll back reproductive rights. French Gates has an unprecedented opportunity to think and act big to address both short-term needs and long-term change. Her support couldn’t come at a more important moment for women and our nation.