Melinda French Gates

“For close to three decades, French Gates was the woman beside a man who would upend the way we thought about computers, and he was the man beside a woman who would change the way we thought about giving. She was also a fiercely private wife and mother, who would retire from an impressive career at Microsoft, where she and Gates met, to raise the couple’s three children. She oversaw their education; managed the Gateses’ massive high-tech estate, Xanadu 2.0; and ran a foundation that would give away more than $77.6 billion”

“French Gates pledged $1 billion over the course of 10 years toward advancing women’s rights. Then, last year, she committed an additional $1 billion, including $235 million to organizations like Paid Leave for All, which she is particularly passionate about. She notes that the United States remains the only Western nation without a comprehensive paid family leave policy. French Gates has also allocated some $45 million toward increasing the representation of women in technology, including AI, and has offered grants of $20 million to a variety of individuals—Jacinda Ardern, Ava DuVernay, Richard Reeves—to distribute as they see fit. 

Advancing the rights of women—and seeing how they fit into the broader equation of social progress—is a cause that French Gates has long championed, even if indirectly. For years, at the Gates foundation, she was the voice urging others to see the gender angle in almost any social problem. It’s also uniquely personal to her, after often finding herself an outlier in rooms full of men: first as a computer science major in college, then later at Microsoft. “Men make certain decisions—not necessarily bad decisions, but decisions based on their lens on society, right?”