- On Wednesday, Melinda French Gates announced the latest initiative in her yearslong effort to donate billions of dollars toward women’s causes. She plans to give $150 million to support several nonprofits aiding women in the workplace.
Melinda French Gates will donate $150 million to nonprofits that aim to increase professional opportunities for women.
About a third of the money—$45 million, according to Axios—will be designated for women’s initiatives in the tech industry, and specifically artificial intelligence.
Quantitative fields like tech and engineering have a reputation for especially poor track records of female representation, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. French Gates’ donation aims to rectify that fact at a time when most DEI initiatives, including those focused on gender equity, are facing scrutiny.
The announcement of the donation came from French Gates’ own nonprofit, Pivotal Ventures, which she founded in 2015.
In a video released with the announcement, French Gates acknowledged that women in the workforce have made advances in recent years, citing increases in C-suite roles and prominent political positions. However, she also referenced a number of obstacles that can slow their progress at work, such as inadequate childcare support, limited flexible working hours, and continued sexism.
“Unless we remove these barriers, we will never achieve true gender equality in this country, and we risk losing the precious progress we’ve already made,” French Gates said in the video.
Women’s underrepresentation in AI
Women are especially underrepresented in the burgeoning field of AI. A 2023 World Economic Forum report found only 30% of people working in AI are women, despite making up roughly half of the overall workforce. That lack of representation may have trickled down to AI systems themselves, which have evidence of gender bias, according to research from the Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership.
Of the $150 million French Gates is donating, $30 million will be allocated for groups including National Partnership for Women & Families, Gretchen Carlson’s Lift Our Voices, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program; a further $75 million will go to the Aspen Institute, which will set up a workplace innovation council in 2025, according to Axios.
This latest donation is part of a much broader set of commitments French Gates has made to women’s causes. In 2019, she pledged to donate $1 billion over 10 years toward “expanding women’s power and influence in the U.S.” Earlier this year, she upped the ante and said she would give a further $1 billion through 2026 toward causes focused on women’s health in the U.S. and around the world. French Gates then invited nonprofits to apply for grants from the $1 billion fund via Pivotal.
“I see so little investment around the globe in women’s health,” French Gates told NPR in October. “We all need to step up and look at these issues.”
Though French Gates is best known for her support of causes concerning women, her philanthropy extends far beyond that. She cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest and most impactful nonprofits, alongside her ex-husband, Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft. The foundation was responsible for widespread immunization campaigns in the world’s poorest countries for diseases including polio, measles, and cholera. In June, French Gates stepped away from the foundation. As part of her departure and an agreement with Gates, she received $12.5 billion that would be donated toward women’s causes.
