Melinda French Gates resigned from the Bill and Melinda Gates: The wider industry impact

Melinda French Gates resigned from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in May 2024, three years after her divorce, taking $12.5 billion with her to direct independently.

Rather than spreading that money across a broad portfolio of causes, Melinda Gates decided to single at one and narrow the target to women and girls and specifically the parts of that problem that have historically gone chronically underfunded, according to a report by Startup Fortune. French Gates has consistently directed her money towards the underfunded areas such as menopause research, childcare infrastructure, domestic workers and representation of women in finance and media. Gates approach avoid popular causes which already attract a lot of funding making sure that each dollar makes maximum impact.

• Open call funding invited applications worldwide for women’s health projects, with $250 million set aside. In June 2026, she added $215 million for reproductive and midlife health, including menopause research, followed by another $10 million at a benefit concert with Olivia Rodrigo. A $20 million fund given to a single leader to deploy at their own discretion functions very differently than twenty separate $1 million grants carrying individual reporting requirements — one approach enables sustained activity, while the other creates the conditions for a genuinely ambitious attempt at change.

The second consistent element of her approach is funding at a scale large enough to change what recipients are able to attempt, rather than distributing smaller amounts thinly enough to keep many organizations modestly funded. French Gates’s giving is organized around a specific thesis: that women’s economic power, health, and political representation are really the same underlying problem viewed from three different angles, and that progress on any one of them remains fragile without progress on the other two as well. Health without economic power leaves people dependent on others. Economic power without political representation means outside parties continue writing the rules. And representation without health or financial security simply isn’t accessible to most of the population in the first place.