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born August 16, 1964 in Dallas, Texas
US-American omputer engineer, manager, philanthropist, activist
60th birthday on August 16, 2024
Biography • Weblinks • Literature & Sources
Biography
The talented young product developer Melinda French rose rapidly through the mostly male ranks of Microsoft in the early 1990’s. In 2000, together with her then husband, Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates, she founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – in 2020 the second largest philanthropic organization in the world. The primary goals of the foundation have been to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the world, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S. The couple, which has three young-adult children, divorced in 2021, but Melinda remains co-leader of the foundation, currently named the Bill and Melinda French Gates Foundation. Since at least 2012 French Gates has focused on family planning and the availability of contraception, and increasingly on the empowerment of women around the world. In 2015 she founded Pivotal Ventures, an independent organization dedicated to finding solutions to problems of US women and families through a combination of investing and advocacy. French Gates’ book, The Power of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World (2019), describes the evolution of her philanthropical philosophy and how she became “an ardent feminist” who believes that women’s equality is necessary to improve life for the entire community.
The second of four children, Melinda French is the daughter of an aerospace engineer who “was a strong advocate of women in math and science—not just personally for his daughters but also professionally in his career,” and a mother who encouraged her and told her, “If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will.” She attended Ursuline Academy, a Catholic all-girls high school in Dallas where she graduated as valedictorian of her class. As she later writes, this was an early source of female solidarity: “My all-girls high school was one large women’s group.” One of her teachers believed in exposing the girls to computers, a radical idea at the time, and this inspired Melinda to study computer science at Duke University, where she was one of very few females in her field: “College for me was coding with guys.” Offered a job at IBM after graduation, she turned it down to join the much smaller and newer company Microsoft, where the opportunities for advancement were potentially greater. Here too she was one of few women in a harshly competitive male world: “My entering MBA class at Microsoft was all guys. When I went to Microsoft for my hiring interviews, all but one of the managers were guys. That didn’t feel right to me.” But Melinda French was excited by her work and advanced rapidly up the ladder, eventually becoming General Manager of Information Products. Nevertheless, at one point early on she considered leaving Microsoft: “It was the culture. It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point they were making and every piece of data they were debating.” With the support of a group of women employees, however, Melinda French was able to create a work environment “where courtesy was not seen as a sign of weakness. A critical mass of women helped civilize the company.”
In 1994 she married Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. When she had her first child, Melinda left work at Microsoft, but in 2000, with a second baby at home, she decided to take a major, though behind-the-scenes role in the couple’s philanthropic organization. “From the beginning,” she writes, “we were looking for problems that governments and markets weren’t addressing or solutions they weren’t trying. We wanted to discover the huge missed ideas that would allow a small investment to spark massive improvement.” French Gates eventually overcame her early reluctance to speak in public and assumed an ever more visible role in the Foundation, particularly since her husband was initially still occupied as CEO of Microsoft.
Trips to poor communities in Africa and India brought French Gates growing awareness of the major issues she would tackle over the years, starting with the importance of family planning, the ability of women to control the size of their families, and expanding to the recognition of gender equity as the key to improving life for all: “Understanding this link between women’s empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity. As much as any insight we’ve gained in our work over the past twenty years, this was our huge missed idea. …. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.”
As she spells out in her book, Gates gradually came to realize the importance of dealing with a myriad of related issues: maternal and newborn health, birth control, education for girls and women, child marriage and female cutting, women in agriculture, women’s unpaid work and women in the paid workforce. She learned to listen to the women themselves to understand how they saw their lives and problems before trying to “impose” her own western solutions, and she learned the power of bringing women together to share their experiences and build solidarity in the face of misogynist traditions. “For the sake of women trapped in poverty and for women at every level of society who are excluded or intimidated by powerful men, women need to meet, talk, organize, and lead—so we can break down the walls and open the doors for everyone.”
Links
Pivotal Ventures. A Melinda French Gates Company. Redmont, Washington.
https://www.pivotalventures.org/ (Aug. 2, 2024)
HBR - Harvard Business Review. October 4, 2019. Melinda Gates on Fighting for Gender Equality. HBR IdeaCast, Episode 703. [Audio, 34:04 min.]
https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/10/melinda-gates-on-fighting-for-gender-equality (Aug. 2, 2024)
Young, Kirsty. February 26, 2024. Young Again. 8. Melinda French Gates. BBC Radio 4. [Audio, 50 min.]. London.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wjbn (Aug. 2, 2024)
Dicker, Ron. October 4, 2022. Melinda Gates: 'I Had Some Reasons I Just Couldn't Stay In That Marriage'. She and Bill Gates divorced in 2021, and she called the end “incredibly painful.” In: Huffington Post.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/melinda-gates-bill-gates-couldnt-stay-in-that-marriage_n_633ee542e4b03e8038c6b952 / (Aug. 2, 2024)
Kristof, Nicholas. April 24, 2019. The Bill-Melinda Gates Romance Startet With a Rejection. The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/opinion/melinda-gates-microsoft-feminist.html (Aug. 2, 2024)
Lev-Ram, Michal. October 3, 2022. Melinda French Gates is investing $1 billion of her own money for women in the United States. Here’s an inside look at her game plan. Fortune Magazine. Time Inc.
https://fortune.com/longform/melinda-french-gates-investing-women-gender-equity-pivotal-ventures/ (Aug. 2, 2024)
Loudenback, Tanza. November 1, 2017. The incredible life of Melinda Gates — one of the world’s richest and most powerful women. Business Insider Nederland.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/life-of-melinda-gates-2016-3/ (Aug. 2, 2024)
Femtech Insider. May 30, 2024. Melinda French Gates Pledges $1 Billion to Empower Women Worldwide. London.
https://femtechinsider.com/melinda-french-gates-1-billion-grants-womens-power/ (Aug. 2, 2024)
“Melinda French Gates.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. July 27, 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_French_Gates (Aug. 2, 2024)
Literature & Sources
Gates, Melinda French. 2019. The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women changes the World. New York. Flatiron Books. (Afterword 2021). Kindle Edition.
Goff, Annie J. 2024. Melinda French Gates Biography. A Journey of Empowerment and Impact. Independently published.
Hayes, Benjamin. 2024. Melinda Gates Biography For Curious Kids: Philanthropist and Co-Founder of the Gates Foundation (Inspiring Stories For Curious Minds). Independently published.
Yonker, Alice. 2024. The Philanthropic Journey of Melinda French Gates: From the Gates Foundation to Women's Rights: A Visionary's Quest for Equality and Impact. Independently published.
Prieto, Judi B. 2024. Melinda French Gates Biography. Inspiring a Generation. Kindle Edition.
Honders, Christine. 2016. Melinda Gates (Superwomen Role Models. PowerKids Press.
Chima, Ihuoma. 2022. The Unconventional Life Of Melinda Gates. Biography of Melinda Gates. Kindle Edition.
Small, Cathleen. 2017. Melinda Gates. Philanthropist and Education Advocate. Leading Women. Cavendish Square.
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