Melinda French Gates, going solo, aims to influence reproductive rights in the U.S.

Last week, Melinda French Gates officially left the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a $12.5 billion check from Bill Gates, per the terms of their separation. Her departure from the foundation she co-founded in 2000 had been announced in May, and on Friday she published a parting memo thanking all who worked with her during her tenure at the foundation. 

The move wasn’t too surprising: In 2021, she and her husband and co-chair, then in the middle of their divorce, agreed that if they found themselves unable to work together, she’d step out and receive resources from her ex-husband to continue her philanthropic work. The following year, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, in an interview with STAT, ruled out the possibility that French Gates would leave — and yet he found himself wishing her well on X on her last day on the job. 

But if the world’s largest private charitable foundation lost a leader, the U.S. gained a new philanthropic powerhouse — one who could dramatically move the needle when it comes to reproductive health and women’s rights in the country. “While I have long focused on improving contraceptive access overseas, in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home,” French Gates wrote in a May 28 New York Times essay about her philanthropic plans. In the U.S., she has already distributed $200 million in grants to women’s rights and health organizations through Pivotal Ventures, an organization she founded in 2015 to pursue charitable initiatives independently from the Gates Foundation. 

“She’s going to be a tremendous counterweight to a lot of the increasingly conservative things that are going on, and not only about abortion, but also questions about access to contraceptives,” said Kathleen McCarthy, the director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at CUNY Graduate Center. “She has enough money to help to keep the clinic systems alive, to help to ensure that women have access to some kind of care.”

Operating outside the confines of the Gates Foundation can help French Gates pursue her priorities with greater impact, opening options that she didn’t have at the foundation. “The Gates Foundation is a bureaucracy, and it’s a very well-established bureaucracy by this point. She will have a lot more freedom to go in a lot of different directions,” said McCarthy. “Her main giving instrument is Pivotal Ventures, which is a limited liability corporation, not a foundation. So she can get involved in political campaigns, she can get directly involved in advocacy.”

In particular, McCarthy expects French Gates to be directly involved in political campaigns and donations, which is not possible for foundations. “She says in ‘The Moment of Lift’ [her book published in 2019] that having a group of men in a room alone without any women making policies that concern women is a form of violence,” she said. “So she wants to get more women into political office, which would have, you know, important implications for health.”

One of the reasons that using an LLC allows French Gates to be more free and nimble in her charitable giving is that her work won’t be subject to as much scrutiny. “She has a lot more freedom using an LLC. The problem is that [LLCs] don’t have to be as accountable as foundations. So if you look at what Laurene Powell Jobs is doing with the Emerson Collective, it’s not as transparent as a foundation. I don’t think Gates will go in that direction, but legally, she has the possibility of doing that,” said McCarthy. 

Much like MacKenzie Scott, who explored different funding strategies with the billions she has distributed since her divorce from Jeff Bezos, French Gates is expected to test unusual funding strategies. She’s unlikely, though, to be interested in no-strings-attached support. “Scott’s grant-making is very different, it’s sort of like ‘drop it on the doorstep in the middle of the night.’ Scott has made it plain that she feels that the real experts are the people working in the nonprofits — which is amazing, but people don’t give big grants that way,” said McCarthy. “But I think Melinda Gates will be much more targeted and really results-focused. She knows what she wants to achieve, and she’s going to do everything in her power to do it.”

So far, beyond selecting organizations to build partnerships with, French Gates has done something pretty unusual: She distributed $240 million to a group of 12 individuals including film director Ava DuVernay, Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Roberta Gbowee, and Native American advocate Crystal Echo Hawk, and each of them will have the responsibility to select organizations and projects to fund. This reflects a mindset that seemed common at the Gates Foundation, too, which awarded outstanding individuals annually. 

“We sometimes see that practice through intermediary organizations. But seeing that practice through individuals and a really diverse group of individuals, I think it would be really exciting and interesting to see kind of how that plays out,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, the vice president of research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which receives funding from the Gates Foundation.

“One thing I think is always important, regardless of what sorts of strategies folks are using for giving, is that the research shows when you work with organizations or individuals who are really close or part of the communities you’re trying to serve, then it’s more likely you can actually build solutions that work,” said Smith Arrillaga, whose organization has done extensive research on the impact of Scott’s unrestricted giving. “That part is really exciting in terms of hopefully having chosen individuals who really understand the changes that communities are seeking to make.”

This is going to be especially important in the U.S., said McCarthy, as working with other individuals can help increase French Gates’ impact and raise more money. Unlike the work of the Gates Foundation in low-income countries, where the amount of funding offered at times surpassed the investments of local governments, philanthropic giving in the domestic context is “still a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money that the federal government invests in all kinds of efforts,” said Smith Arrillaga. “Individuals with a lot to give can have influence, but ultimately, part of what they’re trying to do is influence a system that’s much larger than themselves anyway.”

This is true even if French Gates were to put all her capital behind the issue of reproductive rights in the country, said McCarthy. “She’s one person, and her success is going to hinge on how widely she can build communities,” she said. “You know, $12.5 billion is a lot of money — but even Melinda Gates can’t do it alone.”