Now that she has announced her exit from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda French Gates has at least $12.5 billion and a clean canvas on which to make her mark on philanthropy.
The specifics of her new charitable efforts aren’t yet clear. But French Gates let it be known in a message on Monday announcing her departure from the $75.2 billion foundation she co-founded with her ex-husband that she would continue to focus on gender equality — which she has supported in recent years through Pivotal Ventures, an organization that makes for-profit and charitable investments.
“This is a critical moment for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world — and those fighting to protect and advance equality are in urgent need of support,” she wrote.
French Gates could soon become not just a prime mover in giving to causes related to women and families but an even larger force in philanthropy. She has already committed at least $1 billion from Pivotal, and if all of the money she took in her Gates Foundation departure went into philanthropy she could create one of the 10 biggest grant makers in the United States, ranking just above the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has assets of more than $8 billion.*
“I think she will probably be one of the largest female funders certainly in the U.S., and probably the world,” said Greg Ratliff, senior vice president at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, who served as a senior program officer at the Gates Foundation from 2007 to 2017. “Women’s rights issues have been hit hard over the last three years in terms of funders backing away.”
Indeed, French Gates’s announcement was cheered by advocates for women and girls still reeling from the NoVo Foundation’s announcement four years ago that it was reducing grant making to gender equality.
Since then, “no one has really stepped into the leadership space that they were playing,” said Gabrielle Fitzgerald, chief executive of Panorama Global, a nonprofit that manages the $10 million Ascend Fund, a donor collaborative that seeks to help more women get voted into office.
While French Gates suggested that support for women and girls is needed both globally and in the United States, Fitzgerald noted that most of the work of Pivotal Ventures is concentrated domestically — perhaps a “signifier,” Fitzgerald said, that Gates will be a powerhouse donor to women’s causes in the United States.
French Gates supported the Ascend Fund as part of a 10-year, $1 billion effort announced in 2020 to promote gender equity.
Among Pivotal Ventures’ recent grants are $14 million in 2024 to the School-Based Health Alliance to expand its health-care services in schools, particularly those that serve families with the lowest incomes, and $10 million in 2023 to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for initial planning of its building.
Signs of New Philanthropic Strategy
While the possibility that French Gates will send billions of her dollars to women’s causes is important, she has been undertaking other efforts that could be just as consequential for philanthropy. Last year, Pivotal committed up to $20 million to match donations to women’s causes, and French Gates has for years been working to encourage more donors to give in ways that increase the influence and power of women.
With her separation from the Gates Foundation, French Gates has an opportunity to “supercharge” her Pivotal efforts, said Lowell Weiss, president of Cascade Philanthropy Advisors, who previously worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and listed Bill Gates as a client.
“The Gates Foundation has a very well-established process for making grants and communicating with grantees,” Weiss said. Strategies are developed by in-house experts, and grantees are often judged by how they perform in achieving milestones related to the grant-making giant’s “theory of change,” he said.
“There is a very top-down element to that kind of thinking,” Weiss said. “Melinda now has a chance to rethink every part of the process.”
In the past few years, French Gates has given clues about how she would operate as a standalone chair of her own foundation. She has made grants in conjunction with MacKenzie Scott, who has given grantees a lot of leeway by providing general operating support grants with little, if any, reporting requirements.
In 2022, following her divorce, French Gates, whose net worth is $13.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, updated her philanthropic philosophy in a rewrite of her Giving Pledge letter. Started by her, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, the Giving Pledge is a commitment by some of the world’s wealthiest people to devote at least half of their wealth to charity.
In her update, French Gates said she would attempt to incorporate more feedback from grantees and nonprofits, rather than solely relying on data and metrics. Observers, including Weiss and Fitzgerald, said it is possible French Gates will dive deeper into such an approach, made popular by a burgeoning movement to practice “trust-based” philanthropy — a form of giving in which donors begin to cede control to grantees.
A hallmark of French Gates’s approach at Pivotal has been to address problems on a variety of fronts and in a variety of ways, said Jacqueline Ackerman, associate director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which has received funding from the Gates Foundation.
For instance, Pivotal makes investments in early-stage tech companies run by women and philanthropic grants to organizations that support women and girls, and it provides support to efforts to grow women’s political influence and representation in the United States.
While her former husband is an international celebrity because of his founding of Microsoft and is the main voice of the foundation, Ackerman said that Melinda has emerged in the past several years as a more frequent public advocate.
“Her influence is more than just financial,” she said, “and that will continue to grow as she strikes out on her own.”
That growth is needed, Ackerman said. In 2020, the $9 billion in support of girls and women’s causes accounted for less than 2 percent of all philanthropic funding, according to the Women’s Philanthropy Institute’s Women and Girls Index. French Gates can increase that number, but to do so substantially she’ll need help, Ackerman said.
Said Ackerman: “It can be a game changer, but really only if it’s used to spur more giving.”
