In a new memoir, billionaire Melinda French Gates writes about the end of her marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and her ongoing philanthropic work, directing funds and attention to women's health initiatives. Her book is The Next Day. Also, David Bianculli reviews the new season of Black Mirror.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Melinda French Gates and what is her new memoir about?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today is Melinda French-Gates. Five years ago, she stood at a crossroads. After 27 years of marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, she decided to walk away, not only from a relationship that had defined much of her adult life, but eventually the philanthropic empire they built together.
Last spring, Melinda left the Gates Foundation, the organization that had become the heartbeat of her professional identity. In her new book, The Next Day, Transitions Change and Moving Forward, Gates reflects on these seismic shifts, not just the end of her marriage or the reinvention of her public life, but the deeply personal evolution that came with those transitions.
She takes us inside the moments that have defined her, becoming a mother, grieving the loss of one of her best friends, and grappling with the hard-earned lessons of philanthropy. Melinda French-Gates is the co-founder and former co-chair of the Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization.
She's also the founder of Pivotal Ventures, which focuses on social progress for women and families in the United States. Melinda French-Gates, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me, Tanya. Melinda, I want to talk for a moment about your philanthropic work, because we all have been hearing about the ripple effects of the Trump administration's funding cuts.
And I know that philanthropy is such a tightly interwoven web that often works in collaboration with the government to fund initiatives. How are these cuts affecting the work that you do?
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Chapter 2: How are funding cuts affecting global philanthropy and women's health?
Well, the cuts of things like USAID are absolutely devastating for families all over the world. I Everything, you know, that philanthropy does is we try and find catalytic wedges and ways to work. We take risk where a government can't with taxpayer money and shouldn't. But then once we know something works, it's really up to government to scale it up.
So to see that women won't have health services or there'll be more cases of malaria next year. It's almost unimaginable to me, especially given that both Republican and Democratic administrations really relied on USAID and not only saw the good work that it was doing, but started to scale it up even more. It's why we actually have less death and disease in the world.
So it just makes no sense to me.
How are you thinking about where to focus your energy? I know that over the last few years with Pivotal Ventures, you've really been focusing on women's health and reproductive rights. And so this has to have an impact on the ways that you all are able to make impact.
To know right now in the United States that my two beautiful little granddaughters will have fewer rights than I had growing up, that just doesn't make any sense to me. And so in some ways it makes my work all the more pressing. And I'm still doing what I have been doing. I'm putting more money, though, now into women's health.
I made a billion dollar commitment when I came out of the foundation that through Pivotal Ventures, we would try and really work on some of these places where organizations, for instance, in the United States had been playing defense in terms of women's issues to help put them on the offense. But also we announced 250 million of that is for a women's health fund.
And we're taking proposals from all over the world. to figure out what are ways that we can really advance women's health across the world.
Is it a chaotic line of work in this moment because you're dealing with new information that's coming out, laws that are passed, changes, cuts, all of these things put so much of your work in flux?
You know, where it's the most chaotic and devastating is when you go out on the ground. So I was down in Louisiana about a month ago and to hear that doctors don't even know which services they can provide women for. What can they counsel on? What can they not counsel on? Women who are very concerned about their health saying, I can't have another baby, but where am I going to get birth control?
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences shaped Melinda French Gates’ perspectives on philanthropy and family?
And so there we are, I think it's on a Monday or Tuesday, and they come around and all the girls have to put, not the boys, all the girls have to put their hands on the table. And the priests come around and see who has nail polish on it. And I literally didn't think I was going to be in trouble because here I have this clear pink nail polish on.
And sure enough, I get tapped on the shoulder and sent to the principal's office. Well, Principal, secretary, whatever, calls home to my mom, and the rule was that my mom and the other moms had to come to school with nail polish remover. Well, my mom had two young sons at home, so she had to get in the car, get them in the car, drive to the school. You know, we took care of it.
I go home that afternoon or that evening, and when my father comes home and he hears the story, he is incensed. Not at me. He's like, okay, what's the big deal about nail polish, clear nail polish? But that the priest would have the audacity to pull the girls out of class for a rule infraction, but take our mom's time away from to come to the school to take care of it.
It's a different thing to say, go home and take the nail polish home at the end of the day off and come back the next day. And so my dad had my back and my mom's back and said, just because these men, he's basically saying have the power, doesn't mean it's right. Your mom never got to go to college, but she wanted to. She did.
And her parents just... She grew up at a day and age where her parents had two girls, and they just didn't see the need for her to go to college. She certainly could have gone, and... And she ended up regretting that. She took some college classes later. My mom is plenty smart. And later, my parents start a family real estate business.
And my mom is the one, I mean, they're both running it at night, but it's my mom running it during the day and making sure all the pieces come together of all the various properties they have and tenants and laws and all of that. So she and my dad were determined that both their two girls and their two boys would go through college because they just thought it really was
a ticket in life to go where you wanted.
One of the things that you really admired about your mom, of course, is that she was a great mother, but she, through example, taught you also how to be a great mother. So you have these two big examples in your life of how to be as you move through the world. But one of the best pieces of advice you write that your mother gave you was to set your own agenda or someone else will do it for you.
And I was wondering, what is a time when you had to really put that advice to the test?
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Chapter 4: How did Melinda’s parents influence her career and values?
Well, I'll say... When I was working at the foundation, you know, I started to see through all my travels the difference that when a woman could space the births of her children, it made an enormous difference in the children's health and being able to go to school and then ultimately the wealth of the family.
And yet I would meet so many women around the world who knew about contraceptives but didn't have access. And as I started to learn and study about it and think, is this the right thing for us to do as a foundation? I learned the history of contraceptives and when women had had them and under what circumstances and when they hadn't.
And I realized we needed to do something about this as a foundation. So I decided on the global stage. I'm going to set the agenda because for whatever reason, this has fallen off the global health agenda. And yet it's vital for women and for babies.
We were losing, we still are, too many moms in childbirth because their babies were coming too close and too often, particularly in these low-income countries. And then the babies were dying as well.
It's really interesting in this moment that what was seen as a soft issue is now almost the opposite of that. You're fighting against many headwinds as divestment and women's issues is really like at the center of government funding cuts and lots of other cuts and laws.
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Chapter 5: What role did Melinda’s father play in encouraging her ambitions?
Yes. And I always say, you know, what is it that we value as society? Don't we value our children and our babies more? If you value our children and our babies, don't their mothers need to be healthy? We know a mom is healthier when she can space the births of her children. So to me, it's that we are getting some of our values misaligned right now. And they aren't the values that I hold dear.
And I don't think they're the values that most families hold dear. To me, we need to really think about our values and align our government funding with those values. And we seem to be headed in the wrong direction in my point of view on those issues right now.
Speaking of values, earlier when you said you've been trying your best to give your money away, I chuckled at that. But I only chuckled because it just sounds funny, you know. But when you're a billionaire, right, you can't really ever give all your money away.
And just a few days ago, Abigail Disney, she's the granddaughter of Walt Disney, she said in an interview that anyone who can't live off of $999 million is a sociopath.
And of course, I thought about you because you've been saying this in not so many words for a really long time, that it's important to give your wealth away, that you could never really spend it in your lifetime, you or your family. But here's a question. You've been trying to convince other billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth for many years now.
And I always wanted to know how successful has that been?
Well, it's interesting. It's – you know, when we started out with the Giving Pledge, which was Warren Buffett's big idea, that for society it was right that if you had earned a billion dollars, which I completely agree, you – if you have a billion dollars, you have an absurd amount of wealth. And so you should give – at least half of it back to society because you have benefited from society.
You've benefited from those laws or those roads or the people that helped you along the way to get that scholarship into the college you wanted to go to. You have benefited from that society.
And so we set out to role model for society with the Giving Pledge, founded by Warren Buffett, my ex-husband Bill Gates, and myself, to say, if you're of this level of wealth, join us and commit to giving half away. Neither of us, none of the three of us, would have thought that we would have over 240 families now that are part of the Giving Pledge.
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Chapter 6: How does Melinda French Gates approach parenting and raising her children with values?
Why do you think that was and what did that look like during that time period when when you couldn't hear yourself?
Well, I started to regain my voice when we were talking earlier about traveling the world and meeting women and realizing, wow. I have something I really want to do here, which is contraceptives. And I gained my voice in pulling the foundation together when the foundation was on one trajectory and I had to say, we're also going to do this, right?
And pulling the people together, getting the data, doing the research, finding out where there was and wasn't research, and then leading this global charge, I realized in doing that, oh... I have regained my voice. And so then I had to kind of go back and look and say, well, what was it? Where did I not feel I could speak out? Where did I enter a room?
And I was still put down, even though I was the head of a foundation, right? And I talk about this too, and I have it before publicly, where, you know, I go into a room with a prime minister or president and they would immediately turn to my ex-husband as if he was the expert on the foundation, when in fact he was still working at Microsoft and I'd been traveling more, right?
So I think in all of those sort of moments that happen or those slights, you start to lose or I started to lose who I was. But then in doing the work and really stepping out and having the courage to step out for something that was hard because I was also Catholic. I started to regain my voice and say, no, no, no, no, no.
This voice is really important, and it's something I want to use and use it boldly in the world. When you say you were Catholic and it was hard, what do you mean by that? Well, I grew up in a church that was extraordinarily hierarchical. As I said earlier, run by priests. The women were all nuns. But, you know, the Catholic Church does not believe in birth control. And yet I do.
I know the difference it makes for women all over the world. And so I had to really wrestle with my faith, this faith that has, as I came to really wrestle with it, these man-made rules. You know, a woman should not use a contraceptive. So does that outweigh the fact that she might die or her child might die? Like, I had to really spend time in quiet and wrestle with that.
And I read a lot of different theologians. I literally had a couple of scholars from Notre Dame come teach me how to have the Catholic Church gotten to this position over time. Um, I read a lot and listened a lot to Richard Rohr, who is a quite liberal, uh, Catholic priest and had to form my own point of view because I knew what I felt was right.
But I, I was living in a religion that was telling me, you know, thou shalt not use contraceptives. And yet I was using them and I believed in them and I believed other women should absolutely have access to them. So I had to, what I call wrestle with my own faith and those, those rules. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What is the Giving Pledge and how successful has it been in encouraging billionaire philanthropy?
Chapter 8: How does Melinda French Gates view the relationship between wealth and human experiences like grief and divorce?
And we were literally walking by this new IBM building at this sort of beautiful office park. And my dad, as we walked by, literally said, Melinda, you should put your resume up on that door. You should tape it up on the door. And I said, dad, what are you talking about? He said, they would be silly not to hire you.
And he could see in me and my sister what I couldn't see myself, which was, okay, you're in college, you're getting a computer science degree. There aren't very many of you. And so they should want to hire you. And guess what? He was right. I eventually did get hired by IBM. Yeah.
There's also these really small things that he did. You tell one story in particular in the book that really on the face of it, it's a very small story, meaning it's a very day-to-day interaction you might have, a situation that might come up that really had an imprint on you, though. And it involved nail polish in the Catholic school that you went to. Can you tell that story? Yeah.
Sure. We were quite involved as a family in our local parish church and school, and they were attached to one another. And so the head of the school was a female, was a principal, a nun. The head of the church was a male. The priests were all males. And Somewhat frequently, the priests would come over and make sure that all the rules were being followed.
So, you know, our skirts as girls had to be, you know, so far from the floor when you knelt down. Okay, fine. But anyway, they had this rule that you couldn't have nail polish on. And I wasn't trying to be rebellious. I don't remember, but I put some sort of light, clear pink nail polish on some point during the weekend. trying to look presentable.
And so there we are, I think it's on a Monday or Tuesday, and they come around and all the girls have to put, not the boys, all the girls have to put their hands on the table. And the priests come around and see who has nail polish on it. And I literally didn't think I was going to be in trouble because here I have this clear pink nail polish on.
And sure enough, I get tapped on the shoulder and sent to the principal's office. Well, Principal, secretary, whatever, calls home to my mom, and the rule was that my mom and the other moms had to come to school with nail polish remover. Well, my mom had two young sons at home, so she had to get in the car, get them in the car, drive to the school. You know, we took care of it.
I go home that afternoon or that evening, and when my father comes home and he hears the story, he is incensed. Not at me. He's like, okay, what's the big deal about nail polish, clear nail polish? But that the priest would have the audacity to pull the girls out of class for a rule infraction, but take our mom's time away from to come to the school to take care of it.
It's a different thing to say, go home and take the nail polish home at the end of the day off and come back the next day. And so my dad had my back and my mom's back and said, just because these men, he's basically saying have the power, doesn't mean it's right. Your mom never got to go to college, but she wanted to. She did.
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