Melinda French Gates Is Just Getting Started

Nearly two decades ago, Melinda French Gates had an epiphany. After fielding questions at a press conference announcing Warren Buffett’s decision to give much of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she realized that she and Bill — up until then the one more associated with the foundation — needed to be equal partners in philanthropy. And to do that, she needed to transform herself into a public advocate.

The shift was as much personal as professional. French Gates was traveling the world for the foundation, sometimes living with families for days to learn about the lives of some of the world’s poorest women — a powerful juxtaposition of the gulf between wealth, power, and poverty and, for French Gates, an opportunity to learn from that difference. At the same time, she had three children at home. As a parent, she wanted to show them the importance of standing up and doing the right thing.

“I was in and out of low-income countries at least three times a year. Families were talking to me deeply about what they were up against — women in particular sharing these stories, these heartbreaking stories. And here I am, also a mother at home at the same time, and I’m telling my children to use their voice,” French Gates told the Chronicle in a recent interview. “I realized I had something to give voice to from all these stories in the developing world. And I started to realize that by being a woman, I could give voice to them in a different way than perhaps a man could. I thought that was important.”

It’s been a long road. Bill and Melinda argued over whether French Gates could co-author the foundation’s annual letter — the answer was no when she first tried in 2012. Three years later, in 2015, they published their first letter together. That same year, she struck out on her own, starting Pivotal Ventures, a limited-liability company she uses to make grants, for-profit investments, and political contributions to help improve the lives of women and girls in the United States.

To put the spotlight on issues she cares about, French Gates — who Forbes estimates is worth $30.2 billion — has given TED Talks, appeared on national TV shows, and done interview after interview. Her first book, Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, which came out in 2019, was a bestseller; her second, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, comes out this week.

She made headlines last year when she announced she was leaving the Gates Foundation three years after her 2021 divorce and again when she announced her plan to give $1 billion over two years to advance women’s power and influence globally — capping her transformation into one of the most watched and influential philanthropists today.

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That influence has spread beyond her own work. She has inspired legions of women to become philanthropists, be more vocal, and better engage with the people they’re trying to help, says Elizabeth Barajas-Román, CEO of the Women’s Funding Network, which receives support from Pivotal. Last year, the network’s members gave $4 billion.

“When they put their voice out there about things they care about along with their money, it has a 10 times effect on the issue they care about,” says Barajas-Román. “It really does matter.”

Cristina Ljungberg says she learned an incredible amount about women’s issues, the value of collaboration, and flexible approaches to social change through the Maverick Collective, a group co-founded by French Gates. Ljungberg, who now co-chairs Maverick, has her own organization, the Case for Her, that she founded with another woman philanthropist. It includes two family foundations and two private-investment companies. It focuses on menstruation; sex-positive, pleasure-based sexual reproductive and health-rights education; and abortion — issues that she says men rarely fund. French Gates’s public advocacy has been an inspiration to Ljungberg.

“For her to role model that boldness and risk taking — risking her own reputation — it’s really created a space for women to step forward,” Ljunberg says. “The most valuable contribution that she can make is for her to show up in this room, whether it’s a Maverick meeting or a government meeting, and to write this book and to be so open and honest, to be so human.”

‘She Can’t Look Away’

French Gates’s formative experience in philanthropy was at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was formed in 2000. The pair has given nearly $60 billion to the foundation, and Warren Buffett has given nearly $40 billion, making it an unrivaled force in global health. When French Gates started to get more involved at the Gates Foundation, she started learning how important involving women and girls could be to the success of public-health and development programs through field visits, talking to experts, and studying the literature. But it took years of hard work to get the Gates Foundation to alter its programs and place women at the center of much of its work.

Getty Images for Gates Archive

It’s tempting to think that when your name is on the building, what you say goes. But French Gates never saw things that way. For starters, the Gates Foundation is staffed by experts recruited from top universities and international agencies. Neither French Gates nor the experts at her foundation were predisposed to changing course quickly. “They don’t do anything on a whim. It takes a lot of intention to stand up a new program, to resource it, and to identify what the foundation’s role is to achieve certain outcomes,” says Haven Ley, who worked at the Gates Foundation for seven years before leaving to help start Pivotal in 2015. She is now Pivotal’s chief strategy officer. “And you had Melinda herself, who’s a deeply serious, very curious learner who also doesn’t leap to conclusions quickly.”

French Gates began speaking with women on her field visits to impoverished communities in African countries, India, and elsewhere about family planning. She heard, firsthand, women’s desire to be able to choose when to have children and how many. Those choices lead to important improvements in the women’s own lives — and the lives of their children, families, and communities.

“It was like coming to a recognition,” French Gates says. “I knew I just wasn’t ready until I started to actually see it and understand it and learn it. So my own internal process didn’t pivot on a dime.”

French Gates was never dictatorial, says Gary Darmstadt, former senior fellow in the global development program at the Gates Foundation, where he helped spread gender-equity efforts across the foundation’s various programs. At the foundation, the staff cared about what the founders thought. “You wanted to make them happy. And you wanted to do what they wanted you to do, and you understood that it was fundamentally their foundation and their call,” he says. “But Melinda never made you feel that way.”

On Darmstadt’s first day at the foundation, French Gates showed up at the group’s Washington, D.C., office to talk with employees. She talked to Darmstadt for about 45 minutes, asking about his background and the area of newborn health, one of the issues he would be working on. She asked what he thought the foundation should be working on that it wasn’t. “My sense was she approached it just from a very open-minded point of view, just really trying to learn.”

Mansi Midha

A big part of French Gates’s learning process involved field visits. Darmstadt went on some of those trips with her. Many, he says, were designed to help French Gates better understand the importance of behavioral decisions in a household and how they affect the health of newborns and mothers. French Gates saw how women’s ability to access resources, act on their own knowledge, and make the best decisions for themselves, their children, and their families had far-reaching implications for survival, health, and the well-being of entire communities.

While many big donors conduct site visits with the groups they fund, French Gates tried to go deeper than most do, sometimes living with families for days, helping with chores and daily life, hoping to learn as much as she could directly from women about the lives, perspectives, and needs of the women and girls she hoped to help. In some instances, she met with groups of young women and simply listened to their stories to help her learn about the relationship between child marriage, girls’ education, and health outcomes, Ley says. Some of the stories the women told about their lives were full of tragedy with little hope for a better future.

“Sometimes you have to let your heart break. She’s not afraid of doing that. There’s no buttoning up. There’s no turning away. Sometimes she takes it head on,” Ley says. “I do believe that is what she believes is her obligation as a person of privilege. She can’t look away.”

When French Gates began to integrate women’s empowerment across the foundation’s many programs, her approach was mostly carrot, not a lot of stick. She provided resources for various teams to do research or to collect data, often where little existed, and to come forward with their own ideas about where changes would make a difference. There were meetings and memos and efforts to bring program leaders along with the idea, but there was never a mandate.

In a 2014 article in Science, French Gates argued that by ignoring the role of women and their empowerment, international development programs are failing to achieve their objectives and lose out on opportunities to transform society. It was, she says, a public stake in the ground — a flag to mark the direction the foundation was heading.

“I could have just said to the foundation we will turn from X to Y, but we already had a set of strategies in place that I believed in. I believed in our malaria strategy — I still do. I believed in the AIDS strategy. So what I needed to do was to give the teams time and space for me to signal this is where we’re going. What I did was very purposeful,” French Gates says. “I don’t think it’s a great way to manage and lead an organization, to just say we’re going to go from X to Y. Let people come to it. Because if you do that, then the work happens more deeply, and it sticks and stays over time.”

Taylor Callery for the Chronicle

Challenges Along the Way

But not all of the foundation’s efforts to include gender have been runaway successes. French Gates writes about the importance of engaging with women using the example of the foundation’s agriculture work in Africa. In her book Moment of Lift, she discusses the pitfalls of using only feedback from men to develop rice seeds for small land-holding farmers in Africa with certain characteristics. However, women, not men, did much of the work. And this rice grew low to the ground, forcing the women to bend over to harvest it. They told their husbands to avoid those seeds in the future, and the program suffered.

By engaging women in these discussions and better understanding their roles in the family, community, and economy, French Gates argues in the book, these programs can be more successful. That fundamental argument — when women are empowered, society benefits — is the principle that underlies much of her work.

“Just the idea of including women into value chains and into scientific crop breeding has a huge impact that no one can ever turn away from now,” says Ley, who worked on the agriculture program.

That program, however, has drawn criticism from researchers, some in Africa, and in a Gates Foundation-funded review. The effort was run by AGRA, a public charity started by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and initially chaired by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The Gates Foundation has remained a key supporter, giving $263 million between 2018 and 2023. In August,150 organizations signed a letter from African faith, farming, and environmental leaders asking the Gates Foundation and other funders for reparations for environmental damage; economic losses due to the high cost of seeds and fertilizers and the volatility of markets; and a loss of biodiversity in food systems stemming from AGRA’s industrial-agriculture programs.

A 2021 review of AGRA’s work funded by the Gates Foundation found that women benefited little from these programs. Gains in crop yield were concentrated largely among commercial farmers, who were primarily men.

The report found that, with only a few exceptions, AGRA programs did not have gender-inclusion goals. Most of its programs failed to assess the barriers women and young people faced, and data collection on women was sporadic. Two years after the publication of French Gates’s 2019 book, Moment of Lift, which touted positive results for women from the foundation’s African agriculture programs, the report concluded that AGRA’s gender and inclusion work was still new.

Timothy Wise, a senior research fellow at Tufts University, and author of a study of AGRA’s work, says that rather than doubling productivity and farmers’ income by 2020 — AGRA’s stated goal — malnutrition actually increased. He says AGRA’s industrial agriculture techniques that rely on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and commercial seeds were a poor fit for small African farms.

Cash crops like rice and corn from AGRA pushed out more nutritious traditional crops, which can make it harder for women to feed their families if a crop fails, says Anne Maina, national coordinator at the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya. She says the programs haven’t improved over time.

“French Gates is right that you need to talk to women to form good policy and drive things in a good direction. Doing more of that is a good thing,” Wise says. “But it’s a little bit like giving women a better seat on the Titanic. If the model is a failure, getting more of their input is hardly going to change the outcome.”

AGRA did not respond to a request for comment.

French Gates says that it was challenging to set up AGRA as a new Africa-based institution. While AGRA was one of the biggest things the foundation did in Africa, she says the foundation also had other programs focused on the barriers women faced to owning livestock and land and helped educate men about these issues. And AGRA purposely focused on staple crops like corn and rice that could be both eaten and stored for sale.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

“Am I glad we did it? Absolutely. Did it do as much for women as I had hoped? No. But was it important for us to be transparent about that? Yes, because if we wanted to change and to do more for smallholder farmers, it needs to do better,” she says. “I get that people want to criticize AGRA, and AGRA definitely had flaws, but the agricultural strategy was much bigger than AGRA. We were also doing a lot of other things to try and lift up smallholder farmers. It wasn’t that we thought, ‘Oh, this is the only way to do it.’”

‘Growing and Shifting’

French Gates knew from her own experience that there was plenty to do to level the playing field for women in the United States. Her entire professional life had taken place in largely male environments. She studied computer science in college in the 1980s. She worked at Microsoft in its early years, which she describes as a deeply male workplace and culture. Philanthropy has a long history as a bastion of older white men.

French Gates started Pivotal Ventures in 2015 to advance the well-being of women and girls in the United States. She brought a handful of trusted advisers from the Gates Foundation to start the organization. The goal was to think through what the new entity could be. Ley, part of that early group, brought in speakers and arranged trips. French Gates read copiously to learn what issues were most pressing for women in the United States and how Pivotal could advance women’s power and influence.

From the beginning, French Gates wanted to use a different structure than the Gates Foundation. She created Pivotal as a limited-liability company so she could spend money in any way that could foster change — charitable gifts, political donations, investments in companies.

“I was brand new at it, and I thought I wanted a lot of flexibility. I wasn’t sure actually how much I wanted to do at the beginning, grant making versus V.C. [venture capital] investments versus advocacy,” French Gates says. “The LLC just gave me a ton of flexibility as I was changing and growing and shifting.”

Pivotal focuses on creating large-scale change. So, for example, in its caregiving work, it doesn’t fund groups that provide child- or eldercare. Instead, it works to create the blueprint and environment for systemic change. It supports research that could be used in policy discussions and to help businesses that are developing caregiving products and services. One example: a study done by the Holding Co., a for-profit firm, that determined the caregiving market was worth about $648 billion a year. Pivotal also studies state policies and engages with policymakers and business leaders.

Ley says Pivotal spent about $200 million between 2015 and 2019 in grants to organizations to help Pivotal map out the issues it would work on, determine what its role could be, and test strategies that could spark big changes.

Pivotal, which has about 100 employees, now also focuses on women’s political power, youth mental health, women and tech innovation, centering women and girls of color, and other issues. French Gates made her first funding announcement for Pivotal in 2019: $1 billion over a decade to bolster women’s power and influence in the United States.

When it comes to caregiving, Pivotal’s goal is to create a society where caregivers and families have affordable solutions so that care is a source of comfort and joy rather than burden and hardship, says Renee Wittemyer, Pivotal’s senior director of program strategy. The organization wants to create a policy blueprint for caregiving that can be adopted widely.

Unlike a foundation, Pivotal is free to make political donations, and it has — $15.74 million between 2022 and 2025, according to the FEC and ProPublica 527 databases. It gave $3 million to Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy PAC, which advocates for paid family leave. In addition to making political donations, Pivotal supports a group that works with business leaders to create better leave policies at their companies, and it puts money in two venture funds that invest in care-related businesses.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The groups Pivotal supports tried and failed to get a paid-family-leave bill passed at the federal level during the Biden administration. But they have found success at the state level. Between 2016 and today, the number of states with paid family leave jumped from four to 13.

Caring Across Generations is a longtime Pivotal grantee. Not unlike French Gates’s own field visits, the group worked with the tech consulting and design firm IDEO to conduct focus groups with women who were caregivers to better understand their lives and needs. Through a gathering in 2023 called CareFest, it brought care advocates together with leaders in entertainment, philanthropy, business, and government as part of its effort to create bigger coalitions around the issue. That coalition can help change the cultural understanding of caregiving and advocate for investments in aging, disability, and child care, as well as paid leave, says Ai-jen Poo, the founder of Caring Across Generations.

Research funded by Pivotal has strengthened the argument for better caregiving policies, she says. And French Gates has also been an important advocate: She appeared with Poo on a CBS special on caregiving in 2022.

“She instills a lot of trust and is someone who people follow,” Poo says. “She really goes out of her way to lift up other women and leaders doing the work.”

Limited Transparency

Understanding how Pivotal works, whom it makes grants to, how much it spends, its staffing, and other details of how it operates hasn’t always been easy.

Until very recently, the public knew about only the donations Pivotal chose to disclose. As an LLC, Pivotal is not required to make its grants public, and it has been selective about which nonprofits it names on its website. In 2022, the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation was formed, and it had $530 million in assets at the end of 2023, according to its informational tax return. The foundation is making grants to nonprofits using funds from the 2019 $1 billion announcement, and it will also disburse the money to charitable organizations from the 2024 $1 billion announcement. Pivotal says the foundation’s assets include other funds that have not been announced, but it will not share the amount. So far, Pivotal has spent or has committed to spend in existing grant agreements $875 million of the $1 billion French Gates announced in 2019.

The privacy afforded by an LLC is attractive to many ultrawealthy philanthropists. An LLC offers much more flexibility and far fewer rules than a private foundation, says Dana Brakman Reiser, Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and author of Profit Philanthropy: Elite Power and the Threat of Limited Liability Companies, Donor-Advised Funds, and Strategic Corporate Giving.

An LLC doesn’t require any disclosure of grant-making activity, staffing levels, expenditures, or other information available on the informational tax return of a foundation. The Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, for example, has no staff and only three board members — French Gates, her longtime adviser John Sage, and Brooke Anderson, Pivotal’s CEO. All the decisions are made by staff at Pivotal, which does not need to provide the public with any information at all. Using a foundation in conjunction with an LLC or disclosing grants on a website allows donors to share only the information they choose to; they could use a donor-advised fund or just write a check for any charitable donations they do not want disclosed, Brakman Reiser says.

“The LLC is just one example of how elite donors no longer need to worry about what government or society at large would expect from them. They can pursue their philanthropic goals with much less regulation and much less visibility,” Brakman Reiser says. “It’s a ‘trust us’ model, and I think that’s dangerous.” She is worried that researchers will lose the ability to track the activity and strategy of the biggest donors. “I think that’s a real concern for the nonprofit sector.”

French Gates expects Pivotal to become more transparent over time — largely through the foundation, which discloses its grant making in informational tax returns. And she points to her announcement last year about the $1 billion she is giving away: “I like to signal where I am going.”

‘Even More Important Now’

Alfiee Breland-Noble, founder of the AAKOMA Project, a youth mental-health organization, got startling news last spring. She was one of 12 individuals that French Gates picked to direct $20 million each in grants to other worthy nonprofits. The AAKOMA Project was a longtime Pivotal grantee, but Breland-Noble had never even met French Gates.

“Many days I wake up and it catches in my throat because I think it is so amazing that someone from afar could look at me and say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to put you in this group with Ava DuVernay,’ you know what I mean?” she asks, referring to the acclaimed filmmaker. “‘I will put you in this group with these kinds of folks because I believe in your ability to do this.’”

The money is managed by the National Philanthropic Trust, and Breland-Noble makes decisions about where the funds can go. The idea is that these 12 people will do things with the $240 million that French Gates would never consider. It’s a way to move money to people with deep expertise in particular areas who can make funding decisions better than a centralized grant maker could. It’s one way French Gates is putting more trust in grantees and finding more creative ways to give effectively.

“Why not tap into that real, lived expertise of people who are actually boots-on-the-ground themselves?” Breland-Noble says. “It just helps to grow the opportunity exponentially, to reach into spaces that remain in the shadows. I commend her for it because I agree. I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

The May 2024 announcement of Pivotal’s second $1 billion round of giving was detailed. In addition to the 12 individuals each directing $20 million in giving, French Gates listed recipients and dollar amounts for each area she planned to fund, including $150 million to nine organizations working to take down barriers women face in the workplace, and $235 million to support 23 organizations protecting women’s rights and advancing their power in the United States.

Those funds will go out over two years — far more quickly than the 2019 $1 billion commitment, which is taking place over a decade. French Gates believes there are new threats to gender equity that need to be addressed, Ley says. And her experimentation in this round of funding is likely to foreshadow the future, including an expansion of Pivotal’s work beyond the United States.

French Gates says she intends to increase her giving to Pivotal and to women’s and girls’ issues now that she has left the Gates Foundation. In the early months of the Trump administration, with so many issues that have been close to her heart for decades under attack, the work has become more urgent.

“Society is just better off when women can step into their full power, whether that’s their voice, their decision making, their resources,” French Gates says. “If some things are moving backwards, some of it is that we haven’t invested enough in some of these women’s organizations. They’ve been on the defensive. We need to make sure they’re all on the offensive. For me, my work continues. It just feels like it’s in some ways even more important now.”