Melinda French Gates commits $215 million to women’s health care

Melinda French Gates is committing $215 million in new grants for women’s health care, with half the money aimed at reproductive health and the rest at health issues that arise in midlife, including menopause.

The announcement comes five years after her divorce from Bill Gates and two years after she left the Gates Foundation to run her own organization, Pivotal. The foundation has already pledged $2 billion for projects that support women and families and received $12.5 billion from Bill Gates in 2024 under their divorce settlement.

French Gates, 61, said the new grants address long-standing gaps in medical research. She noted that women experience higher rates of disability and illness than men, yet only five cents of every research dollar spent worldwide goes to women’s health. She said the male body has long been treated as the default in medicine, leaving conditions such as autoimmune disease and the effects of menopause understudied.

She described menopause as “literally invisible to the world” and said many women begin to feel its effects in their early 40s, just as careers and family responsibilities peak. French Gates said women spend an average of nine years in poor health, and half of that time occurs during perimenopause and menopause.

The grants also support maternal health and reproductive rights in the United States after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. French Gates called the loss of abortion access “devastating” and said her two granddaughters will have fewer rights than she did. As a Catholic, she said she studied church teaching on the issue and concluded that the decision to end a pregnancy belongs to the woman.

French Gates said she met Jeffrey Epstein once and found the encounter so disturbing that she had nightmares afterward. She described him as “an abhorrent human being” and said the justice system failed to stop his crimes. She added that survivors deserve peace and justice and that greater transparency is needed.

She said she remains focused on her work at Pivotal and plans to continue full time into her 70s. She said her values have not changed since high school, when she quoted the line often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that is to have succeeded.”