In today’s edition: the rise of political violence, a widening gender pay gap, and Fortune’s Lila MacLellan chats with Melinda French Gates about her latest society-shifting investment.
“I grew up in a household where my mom said, ‘Set your own agenda, or someone else will,’” Melinda French Gates told me yesterday morning, minutes after stepping off the stage at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in New York.
The billionaire philanthropist had just announced a key post-Gates Foundation plank in her long-held agenda of advancing women’s power globally. She outlined a $100 million investment in women’s health research that will center on conditions that are most overlooked but the biggest drivers of death and morbidity for women.
The plan is to investigate issues across a woman’s lifespan, focusing on areas such as cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, and mental health, including depression and PTSD. Last year, French Gates also put out an open call for women’s health nonprofits to apply for $250 million in grants, and those proposals are now being vetted. “This isn’t the last you’re going to hear from me on women’s health, either,” French Gates told me. “It’s too fundamental. It’s where women’s lives begin, so they can go do everything they want to do.”
“We’ve asked women for far too long to deal with a lot of pain and suffering,” French Gates said.
A central goal of the new fund is to find solutions quickly, and to encourage treatment development within years, rather than decades, French Gates explained. To that end, her Pivotal Ventures is partnering with Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit health research network led by Regina Dugan, the first woman to lead the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Each group contributed $50 million to this investment.
The Gates Foundation, which French Gates is no longer working with, recently announced its own effort on women’s health—a $2.5 billion commitment.
Launched in 2020, Wellcome Leap has already begun researching issues such as stillbirths, heavy menstrual bleeding, and the role menopause plays in Alzheimer’s risk, using a model similar to DARPA’s—it leverages global, interdisciplinary teams at institutions around the world, sets tight timelines, and takes an agile approach. The new partnership’s programs, which will start in 2026, should yield results within three to five years, French Gates and Dugan said.
French Gates is confident that pushes like this will attract the support of public and private stakeholders for humanitarian reasons alone, but there’s also an obvious economic argument. “If you’re a business leader for a small company, a medium company, or a Fortune 500, you want the women in your workforce—usually they are half your workforce—to bring their full creativity, their full vitality, their full energy to whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve in business,” she told me. “But if they have to be out because they’re dealing with a chronic health issue or they’re dealing with a cardiovascular event that no one can figure out, that’s a loss of business productivity.”
To be sure, it’s not the easiest time to launch this ambitious work. In the United States, political division has led to abortion bans in several states, well-funded conservative activist groups have been attacking diversity and equity, and misinformation campaigns have led some Americans to question everything from vaccines to the safety of the birth control pill.
But French Gates says she’s not concerned about political friction impeding the fund’s progress. “We’re talking about women’s health, something we all know is important,” she said. “And we’re talking about basic scientific research.”
“This money is in our hands to decide what to do with it,” she added, “and we’re moving forward.”
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
The gender pay gap in the U.S. widened for the second year in a row. Between 2022 and 2024, it fell from 84% to 80.9%. The Census data comes as women are again leaving the workforce amid the loss of workplace flexibility and a tight job market. USA Today
OpenAI's roots as a research lab are its competitive advantage in the AI race. That's what OpenAI chief revenue officer Ashley Kramer said at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech gathering this week. Fortune
The assassination of Charlie Kirk reveals a dangerous rise in political violence. The 31-year-old conservative political figure's fatal shooting follows the killing of Democratic Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband over the summer, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and the 2022 attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband in their home. Washington Post
GM CEO Mary Barra sold 40% of her personal stock in the automaker. Her stock-based compensation includes automatic triggers to sell when it reaches a certain price; this chunk sold for $35 million. USA Today
ON MY RADAR
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Angel Reese and Chicago Sky face crossroads as WNBA season ends: Will she return? The Athletic
PARTING WORDS
"It's often been said that women can't win whatever you do or don't do, but I feel like I'm winning in this moment. I get to watch myself age."
— Writer Elizabeth Gilbert on abandoning Botox and shaving her head
