When Melinda French Gates stepped away from the Gates Foundation earlier this year to focus on her own philanthropy, she left behind a transformed institution — where gender equality had become ingrained in its mission to advance global health. Now the team she helped build is determined to accelerate that work, even in her absence.
“We just don’t think we can achieve our goals without a focus on gender inequality around the world,” said Anita Zaidi, president of the Gates Foundation’s gender equality division. “I can’t imagine a world in which this would change.”
Zaidi has witnessed the Gates Foundation’s development on gender equality firsthand. She joined the philanthropy 11 years ago to help lead efforts on vaccines, infectious diseases, and children’s health, bringing years of experience as a pediatrician in her native Pakistan, where she accrued accolades — including the $1 million Caplow Children’s Prize — for bringing health services to women and children living in poverty.
When the $67.3 billion foundation launched its gender equality division in 2020, it tapped Zaidi to dedicate herself full-time to ensure that women’s and girls’ needs be considered central to its global health work. Under her stewardship, the foundation has helped fund research and distribution networks for breakthrough innovations like one-dose HPV vaccines and self-injectable contraceptives and implemented far-reaching mentorship programs for women in global health.
Now, as the gender equality division approaches its fourth anniversary amid compounding crises for women — including a backlash against women’s legal rights in countries like Afghanistan and wars raging in Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine — it’s expanding its focus beyond traditional health initiatives and toward building economic power and leadership pathways for females worldwide.
In a conversation with the Chronicle, Zaidi discussed her division’s evolving strategy, her response to her friend French Gates’s departure, and why she maintains “relentless optimism” about the future of gender equality.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you talk about your priorities as we look toward 2025? How have they changed over the years?
We’re coming up to our fourth birthday in November, but gender equality has been embedded in the foundation’s DNA from the very beginning. What changed in 2020 when the division formed is that in addition to the work that all of the teams are doing, we [now] have an independent division that looks across the foundation’s work and makes sure that we lead in areas that have an overarching influence on women’s lives.
I’ve picked three big themes for our work: women’s and children’s health, which includes both maternal health and sexual and reproductive health; women’s economic power; and advancing pathways for leadership for women. These three themes have to go hand in hand. Women face compounding barriers to health, lack of access to education, lack of access to economic opportunity, and lack of access to sexual reproductive and health services. All of these need to be addressed, and they’re interconnected.
How has Melinda Gates’s departure from the foundation affected your division?
Definitely mixed feelings. I’ll be honest about that. I personally felt it as a loss of a friend at the foundation. Melinda and I worked very closely together over many years.
But at the same time, including from our division, there’s a lot of excitement about new money in the sector. Melinda is going to focus exclusively on women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, and we think that that’s really important, especially in the U.S.
What are some of the specific innovations you’re most excited about?
Sexual and reproductive health is very topical, and it’s a growing area of our portfolio. One approach we’re taking is developing what I call “system-independent products” for women. Women can get access to these products without going through any health-care provider — they can just buy them from pharmacies or drug shops in developing countries.
There’s a product called DMPA, which we can now make as a self-injectable (produced as part of a decade-long collaboration with Pfizer and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation). It comes in a little bubble, and you can give the injection to yourself, like an insulin injection. Right now it’s just one company, but now we have been funding two other companies working on generics. We will quadruple the number of these self-injectables available around the world, which women can just give themselves, and it gives them protection from pregnancy for three to four months. It’s a game-changer.
Another system-independent type of work in developing countries is being able to just put a patch on your side for contraception — not those one-week patches but three-month patches. That work is looking really exciting, and we’re going to be able to accelerate the timelines. When we first got into this work in gender equality, people thought this was going to be a 2030 thing. I think we’ll be able to do it by 2026 or 2027.
How has the Gates Foundation’s approach to gender equality changed in your 11 years there?
There are totally new areas. Women’s economic opportunity is newer, very intentionally thinking about how to move women up the ladder out of poverty around the world.
When you talk to women around the world, they talk about two things: access to capital to start their own business and all of the opportunities that having smartphones now opens up for women. We’ve always focused on inclusive financial systems, but now we’re also focusing on adoption, like looking at what prevents women from adopting technology.
The work on social norms around gender is all new. And then there’s all the work we’re doing around women’s leadership. Global health is 70 to 75 percent women, but very few make it to senior roles. I’m from Pakistan, and I am a pediatrician and faced many of these barriers myself. I remember some transformative conversations that I had in the U.S. when I would visit for conferences and meet senior women leaders who were like, “Take risks — own your power.”
We fund a program called Women Lift Health that we started and is now growing around the world that mentors and trains midcareer women in global health to be leaders. Two other areas that have an outsize influence on women’s lives are economics and law. Most of that work is being funded through this philanthropic partnership called Co-Impact. If you look around the world, very few women make it to the senior judiciary, so networking and mentorship will make a very big difference.
These are all long-term investments. We will see the impact in 10 to 15 years, which is why I don’t get depressed. These are all the things that we do right now to be in it for the long game.
With some of the push-back and regression we’re seeing globally on gender equality, how do you maintain that optimism?
Often when progress happens, you start taking things for granted, and the lesson is that you can’t. People don’t give up power easily — in fact, pursuing equality for people who have power can feel like a loss.
This is why the norms work, engaging young people around the world, it’s become even more important. I maintain what we could call relentless optimism. Perhaps it’s just my personality, but I truly can see how we make a difference in the short term and in the long term.
We shouldn’t give up. We should keep fighting, keep inspiring, inspire the younger generation, and tell them that it’s not going to be easy.
