When Melinda French Gates steps down from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this week, she will take with her $12.5 billion and a commitment to make a difference for the girls and women of the world. French Gates says she will be donating $1 billion over the next two years to individuals and organizations working on behalf of women and families globally. She has vowed to focus on women and families.
It’s the second billion-dollar commitment French Gates has personally made in the past five years, reports The Associated Press. In 2019, she pledged to expand women’s power and influence over the ensuing decade.
Research from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy has found that while women today hold 40% of global wealth, and that women are more likely to give — and, on average, give more — than men, less than 2% of philanthropic giving in the United States directly benefits women and girls.
Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute, said that 2% ceiling could be broken thanks to French Gates’ commitment. “One donor does have the potential to make a difference,” Ackerman told The Associated Press. “But for that to be sustained long term, for that to change the numbers for more than just one or two years, you really do have to inspire others and be part of a movement. Melinda French Gates has used tools like collaborative giving in the past, has used her voice and her network, and her platform to advocate for women and girls,” Ackerman said. “And so, there’s every indication that she knows this and that she does intend to use her platform to spur more giving by others.”
French Gates has been a philanthropist for years, helping to found the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 (soon to be known as just the Gates Foundation), and then her own philanthropic organization, Pivotal Ventures, in 2015.
In an op-ed published last week in The New York Times, French Gates wrote that in the nearly 20 years she has spent as an advocate for women and girls, she has learned that there will always be people who say “it’s not the right time to talk about gender equality. Not if you want to be relevant. Not if you want to be effective with world leaders (most of them men). The second the global agenda gets crowded, women and girls fall off.”
“It’s frustrating and shortsighted,” she wrote. “Decades of research on economics, well-being and governance make it clear that investing in women and girls benefits everyone. We know that economies with women’s full participation have more room to grow. That women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them. That reducing the time women spend in poor health could add as much as $1 trillion to the global economy by 2040.”
Within the United States, maternal mortality rates continue to be unconscionable, with Black and Native American mothers at highest risk. The U.S. remains the only advanced economy without any form of national paid family leave, and the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.
As part of the billion dollars Pivotal will be funding, $200 million will go to these existing U.S. nonprofits supporting women and girls: Center for Reproductive Rights, Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity, Collective Future Fund, Community Change, Institute for Women’s Policy Research, MomsRising Education Fund, Ms. Foundation for Women, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Partnership for Women & Families, National Women’s Law Center, New America, The 19th, Roosevelt Institute, States United Democracy Center, Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
She is also granting 12 organizations $20 million each for them to distribute as they see fit. That group represents a “wide range of expertise and experience” and, she writes, she is “eager to see the landscape of funding opportunities through their eyes, and the results their approaches unlock.”
Those recipients are: Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble, founder of the AAKOMA Project; Olympic gold medalist Allyson Felix; filmmaker Ava DuVernay; Crystal Echo Hawk, founder of IllumiNative; Gary Barker, founder of Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice; Hauwa Ojeifo, founder of She Writes Woman; former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern; Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Roberta Gbowee; M.V. Lee Badgett, founding partner of Koppa: The LGBTI+ Economic Power Lab; Richard V. Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men; Sabrina Habib, co-founder and CEO of Kidogo in East Africa; and Shabana Basij-Rasikh, co-founder of the School of Leadership Afghanistan.
Finally, she will introduce a $250 million initiative in the fall focused on improving the mental and physical health of women and girls globally through an open call, launching later this fall, with Lever for Change.
In 2021, when Bill and Melinda Gates announced the end of their marriage, they also announced a plan to continue jointly with their philanthropic organization, but they put in place a contingency plan in case they could no longer work together. The plan was that Bill would buy out Melinda’s shares and she would leave the organization.
