French Gates Puts Another $50M Into Women’s Health — and Calls for More

Melinda French Gates has a message for the world’s major philanthropists: Women’s health is too big a problem to leave to one funder. This week, French Gates committed another $50 million to women’s health and women’s rights organizations, bringing her total to more than $600 million since leaving the Gates Foundation in 2024. And she explicitly called on others to match her giving and urgency.

The Menopause Society, a nonprofit for health-care professionals, will receive $10 million so it can train more frontline health-care providers nationwide. The new pledge includes $40 million for Co-Impact, a global organization that distributes grants to local nonprofits; it will use the funds to help integrate mental health services into maternal and primary care in Africa and other regions. French Gates is a longtime supporter of Co-Impact, a donor collaborative focused on women’s health and gender equity that a number of other high-profile women funders have backed, including MacKenzie Scott. Co-Impact primarily funds local and women-led organizations. 

More grants to support women’s health are expected from French Gates later this year as she expands her focus beyond reproductive and maternal health to include midlife health and menopause. Those areas, she said, have been widely ignored, even though millions of women seek medical attention for conditions related to hormonal changes. 

The gaps in women’s health care over all are stark: More than 19 million women in the United States lack access to contraception in their communities; a woman dies every two minutes from childbirth-related causes worldwide; and less than 1 percent of research on aging addresses menopause, according to data provided by Pivotal, a group of grant making, advocacy funding, and venture capital investment organizations. 

French Gates has consistently tied women’s health to broader societal issues such as employment, family stability, and full participation in society rather than treating it as a siloed cause, notes Jacqueline Ackerman, director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. And this new funding shows that she continues to do that “systems-level thinking” while evolving her giving as she learns, Ackerman said. 

Globally, women’s mental health is woefully underfunded, said Yasmin Madan, Co-Impact’s senior director of strategic partnerships. In developing nations, only one in 10 women who need mental health care actually receives it, she said. To have a major funder like French Gates bring funding and attention to this issue is “game changing,” Madan said. 

“This is a starting point,” she said. “I have worked in this field for over two decades, and when I started, nobody talked about women’s mental health during pre- or post-pregnancy at all. It’s shocking. Women’s health is such a clear indicator of the child’s health and [the woman’s] own quality of life.” 

A Pattern of Big Bets on Women

This week’s announcement follows several major commitments French Gates has made in the past two years. The pledges include $250 million to organizations improving women’s health globally, $240 million distributed to 12 leaders — including athlete Allyson Felix and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern — to direct toward women’s health work, and $235 million to protect women’s rights in the United States. Last fall, Pivotal also launched a $100 million partnership to advance women’s health research with Wellcome Leap, a U.S. nonprofit created by Wellcome Trust. 

French Gates said she is expanding her commitment because “the world simply hasn’t made women’s health a priority.” She called on other funders to join her, arguing that the problem is “too massive and the stakes too high for any organization to go it alone.”

“I’m calling on more funders to join me in backing the people and organizations working to find better solutions for women,” she said in a written statement. “ When women are healthier, their families, communities, and countries are, too.”

This kind of statement sets French Gates apart from other ultra-wealthy funders, Ackerman said. Major donors rarely publicly call on others to give alongside them, according to Ackerman, who notes that the way French Gates frames the call to action is both a challenge and “an invitation with warmth to it.”

The call comes at a difficult moment for the nonprofit sector; nearly 70 percent of nonprofits report being affected by funding cuts, according to Women Moving Millions, an organization that tracks and supports women philanthropists. 

French Gates’s announcement is a “powerful example of transformative, women-led philanthropy,” and her approach “serves as a model for many in our community who are looking to utilize their resources for greater impact,” said Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions. French Gates has worked on women’s health issues for more than 25 years, first through the Gates Foundation, which she co-founded in 2000, and since 2015 through her organization Pivotal Ventures. Since leaving the Gates Foundation, she has emerged as an independent force in global philanthropy, increasingly focused on issues she said have been systematically underfunded for decades. She has pledged to direct more than $2 billion to groups focused on women in coming years.