A special interview with Melinda French Gates
This week, FEMINIST sat down with philanthropist and author Melinda French Gates to talk about her vision for gender equity, the power of life transitions, and her new book, ‘The Next Day’!
Melinda French Gates is a philanthropist, businesswoman, author, and global advocate for women and girls. She is the founder of Pivotal, a philanthropic organization advancing gender equity worldwide, and the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the world.
What does being a feminist mean to you?
It means believing that every woman, everywhere in the world, should have the right to step into her full power—whether that’s in her family, her workplace, or her community. It also means believing that women should be equally represented when it comes to making decisions, controlling resources, and shaping policies and perspectives at all levels of society.
You’re the founder of an incredible organization called Pivotal, which works to advance women’s power and influence in the U.S. and around the world. What main steps do you think we need to take to achieve gender equity?
As Pivotal was just starting its work, we did a lot of research into the barriers holding women back. The data is clear that if we want to see a world where women have truly equal power and influence, there are a number of levers we need to pull.
I’ll name just a few. Women need access to healthcare—quality healthcare—including reproductive and mental health services. We need more women at all levels of government making decisions and setting policy. In the U.S., we need both policymakers and employers doing more to make it easier for people with caregiving responsibilities to also be able to earn a living. And we need more women in high-powered industries like tech and AI and venture capital because those industries play an outsized role in shaping the future.
Images of moments Melinda French Gates discusses in her latest book, “The Next Day”.
You've committed a billion dollars to improving lives for women and families around the world, including by investing in women’s reproductive freedom in America at a critical moment when many are shying away. What personal conviction drives this investment despite the challenging political landscape, and how do you envision it reshaping women's bodily autonomy for generations to come?
That’s right, I made that commitment right as I left the Gates Foundation. For me, the Dobbs decision was absolutely a call to action. While I’m working on a number of different issues and approaches as part of that commitment, reproductive freedom in the United States is definitely one of them, because I am just so appalled at the idea of a law that was on the books going away. It makes me livid that my granddaughters may have fewer rights than I did. As women, decisions about our bodies should belong to us alone—it’s just that simple.
You’ve written a new book titled The Next Day, which offers powerful lessons from the pivotal moments of transition in your life. Why this topic, and why now?
Well as I write on the very first page, I never expected to be writing a book like this, but there’s a lot that’s happened the past few years I didn’t see coming, from ending my marriage of nearly three decades to leaving the foundation I co-founded to start a new chapter in my philanthropy. Along the way, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to think about transitions and all that they have to teach us —both the ones we hoped for and the ones we never, ever would have asked for.
When my younger daughter graduated from college last year, I actually got to give the commencement speech, and in talking to her classmates as I prepared for it, I realized they were grappling with some of the same challenges around transitions that I was. That’s when I decided that I was going to try to write about the people and ideas that have helped me through the major transitions in my life in case they might be helpful to others.
Where did you draw inspiration for the book’s title, The Next Day?
We can’t control what happens to us in life, but we do get to control how we respond. That’s why one of my theories of transitions is that the next day is when the real work begins. There’s the day you lose a dear friend to cancer, and then the next day when you start to learn how to live with grief and how to keep alive what they planted in you. There’s the day you leave a job you loved for a long time, and then the next day when you wake up and make your coffee and realize you’re not driving to that same office anymore so it’s time to start forging a new routine. There’s the day you ask for a divorce, and then the next day, when you start figuring out how you are going to make a home and a future for yourself in this new reality. The decisions you make that day are big ones and they’re about how you make your life your own.
As women transition through different phases of life, they are often defined by their relationships to men: somebody’s daughter, girlfriend, wife, mother. What has helped you to shape your sense of identity through all of the transitions and the noise?
You’re right, and that’s exactly why I think the relationship you have with yourself is one of the most important relationships you will ever have in your life. You are the only person on this planet responsible for knowing who you are and what your values are. I’m really lucky that I had a chance to learn this at a relatively young age. The nuns in charge of my Catholic high school created a makeshift chapel out of two classrooms and encouraged us to spend a lot of time in there praying and meditating and journaling. That helped me learn to distill my inner voice from all the other voices I heard around me about who other people thought I was supposed to be—and it’s one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me.
If you could give the current chapter of your life a title, what would it be? And beyond your philanthropic work, what personal or professional directions are you most excited to explore next?
I actually have an answer to this one! Every year, I choose a word of the year, and this year’s word is “discover.” During times of transition, there is a lot of uncertainty, but also a lot of possibility. It hasn’t been quite a year since I left the foundation, and I think it’s really exciting that there are people and ideas I haven’t even met or encountered yet who are going to inspire me to take the next chapter of my philanthropy in new directions. Also, I’m having a lot of fun watching my two little granddaughters discover the world. Discovery is a theme across the board for me right now.
