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Chapter 1: How does Melinda French Gates define forgiveness?
Are you good at forgiveness?
Yes. Yes. Yes, I think I am. If you can't eventually forgive somebody, then you hurt yourself, I think, right? And I don't want to live my life hurting myself.
I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is Melinda French-Gates.
I've learned that love absolutely takes trust, absolute trust. And if you have that deep trust, both partners can grow individually and together.
Melinda French-Gates has lived through some very high-profile turning points. including ending her marriage to Bill Gates and starting her own separate philanthropic work. She wrote beautifully about all of it in a memoir that was published last year called The Next Day, Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward. And it is my great pleasure to welcome Melinda French-Gates to Wildcard. Hi. Hi.
Thanks for having me, Rachel.
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Chapter 2: What pivotal moments influenced Melinda's career?
I'm so pleased that we could make this work. Me too. We're going to do round one, Memories.
Memories.
Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, let's go. Three cards, three questions. You pick one, two, or three.
Three.
Three. What's a routine from your childhood that you miss? Oh, gosh.
I guess... Getting ready in the morning with my sister. So I have an older sister who's 22 months older than me, Susan, and then two much younger brothers. But we just, even when we were in grade school, we shared a bathroom and we would get ready together in the morning and curl our hair and talk about the day ahead. And then when we were in high school, you know, the whole thing.
I grew up in Dallas, Texas. Mm-hmm. So the big hole, big hair thing. So there was some time. There was an investment happening. Oh, there was a lot of time. Maybe an hour before we went out. And hairspray. And hairspray. So you had a lot of time to, like, talk about your day and visit and say, well, what do you think of this color? What do you think of that ribbon? What should I do here?
And so I just – we're still very close, but we live in different states. And so I just missed that, like – I hadn't even thought about it, that sweet routine we had together. Yeah.
Do you still – I don't know if you ever have occasion to be in a hotel room with her. Like have you found yourself as adults falling back into that? That has happened to me with my sister where circumstances will mean we're in the same place with the same bathroom and all of a sudden we're getting ready together at the same time and I have a similar kind of nostalgic flashback.
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Chapter 3: What motivated Melinda to focus on women's health?
I would say working at Microsoft in the early years. I worked there for nine years. I was a computer science undergraduate, went straight to business school, and then boom, straight to Microsoft. And I was quite young when I started. There were very few women in tech. And because I had this computer science background and this business background, it was a natural fit.
And I was a part of a class of MBAs. The first class that was there, there were 10 of us, nine guys, and me. Is that right? Oh, yeah. And, you know, I learned a lot about how... I didn't want to be in a work environment. I loved the fast-paced nature of it. I'm very competitive, even when I play games with my kids or at home. I love that competitive, that we knew we were creating new products.
I joined back in 1987. There were only... You know, there were like 1,800 employees. It was tiny still. We knew we were changing the world. And I loved all of that and that creativity and being around smart people. So I learned that I like to work in that type of environment.
Chapter 4: How did Melinda's childhood shape her values?
But I also learned that I didn't like that sort of rough and tumble, elbow each other, be the smartest person in the room, the boys' debate club. And so... As I moved up, because there weren't many women there, and I was a good manager. I had managed people in high school and in college and in business school. As I moved up the ranks, I realized I no longer wanted to play that game.
I would leave work, and at the end of the day, I'd go to the grocery store, and I just wasn't a very nice person anymore. And I thought, that's not who I want to be. And so I thought, I'll leave. I'll go get another job. But maybe before I do that, I'll just try being myself. I knew I'd fall flat on my face, whatever.
And as I started to be more myself, and because I was managing large teams, people started flocking to my groups around the company. And others would say to me, how did you get that developer, that hard-charging developer, you know, from out of the project to come work in the consumer division? And I started to realize it was the culture I was creating.
Which is so interesting because you learned – the question was what place shaped you more than – any person, your answer was your experience at Microsoft, but it was almost in opposition to that culture. You learned and were shaped by that place as you developed in opposition to the mainstream culture, which is so interesting.
And this is one thing I've learned about myself over the many years, is that I work against the N-O-T-S, the nots. Who do I not want to be? Yes. And it's true. When I go back and look at who was I friends with in college, and I would see some of these – I went to Duke University. I came from a very middle-class family in Dallas, Texas.
But as I would see some of these kids who were more of wealth and of means and – sort of acted like they were all that because of coming from a family with a name or wealth, I thought, I do not ever want to act like that. And if I'm ever lucky enough to be in that situation, absolutely not. I would never want to raise kids that way.
So I learned over time, I work against that opposition to see it helps shape who I don't want to be. Totally. The The last thing I'll say about this is just I also work against the knots in life, the K-N-O-T-S. So sometimes when something's really hard and gnarly and you can't figure it out and it's bothering you and stuff, that's where the biggest growth is.
And I need to look at that and sort of try and relax the pressure on myself and say, this is tough, but I'm going to figure out my way through it. And that's where I've grown and learned also the most. Yeah.
You know what I love about the idea of defining yourself in opposition to what or based on what you don't want to be? It's like a sculpture. It's like you're handed this big block called life and the people in it. And you're just like chipping away. You don't know what you're sculpting even. You don't know who you are actually.
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Chapter 5: What lessons did Melinda learn from her time at Microsoft?
Where we've done research and where we have funded around health, we've assumed the man's body as the default body. And then hers kind of comes next. But now we're learning that when you invest in women's health, our bodies work very differently than men.
And so I'm really investing in lots of ways now in women's health to make sure we can find good solutions, break through the barriers for women.
But it's so big, Melinda. Women's health is, I mean, it's everything from like menopause to birth control, like education. How do you begin to focus your resources so that they make the biggest impact?
Yeah. So I know from longstanding health research when I was at the Gates Foundation is that reproductive health is the number one most important thing. You have to at least do that because when a woman – has access to a contraceptive, a contraceptive of her choice. She will space the births of her children. She is healthier. She doesn't lose her life. She doesn't get a fistula.
And the babies are healthier because they need to be spaced so she has enough time and energy to feed them and they get what they need. So we know that is a bare minimum, but way above that. When I now am focusing on health because I feel like the foundation's doing that, I'm doing some of that at Pivotal, but I'm now looking at what are the biggest killers of women. Well, here's the biggest one.
Cardiovascular disease, 35% of women's death is from cardiovascular disease. And yet, a woman goes into the health system, even in our own country, and the chance she is diagnosed with having a heart attack is very low. 50% of cases for women are missed. And it's because we think of cardiovascular disease as a man's disease.
Uh-huh.
Totally. So with Welcome Leap, we're together putting in $100 million to study cardiovascular disease in women. And where should we intervene sooner? What should we look at? What are the biomarkers? And what can we bring forward more quickly? for women's cardiovascular disease.
At the end of 2026, we will pick another very large topic, and we're looking at potentially either mental health for women or autoimmune diseases, because those are the two that really disproportionate amount of autoimmune diseases women are affected by compared to men. So that's where I'm starting. Then I'm finding partners to partner with me who believe in putting in money for women's health.
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Chapter 6: How does Melinda navigate trust after her marriage?
She's building a business. Not my lane. So to go back to her and say, you know, I regret even saying that. That's up to you, whatever you decide to do.
You know? Did it take you more than a minute to learn to trust again?
Because that had been broken in your marriage. Of course. Of course. I thought it might never happen again for me. And that was okay, too. Like, I trusted myself, though. And if you trust yourself and you love yourself, I have lots of friends, male, female, kids. You know, I thought I was going to live my life differently. possibly by myself, but with all those amazing people in my life.
So I didn't know if I would ever trust again, right? But I have learned that, that with the right person, you can. And it's baby steps at first, and you build on that, and you see it, and you test it, and then you can find it. Yeah. right? There are lots of good people in the world. I have been so lucky with so many amazing people in my life.
And look, even after I left the foundation, there are lots of people there that I worked with that I keep in touch with who are beautiful souls and who are incredible, right? And I still trust them even though I'm not there anymore, right? I trust they're carrying out the work in whatever way they think is right. Right. Okay. Three new cards. One, two, or three? I will go with one.
Are you good at forgiveness?
Yes. Yes, I think I am. I think I am. But I've learned that forgiveness can take a long time, and you can't rush it. Like, you have to go through every piece. I'll take a friendship in particular without naming names, but a close girlfriend where I've known this person a long time. They're a truth teller. I'm a truth teller to her. But we just— You know, we bungle some things sometimes.
We hurt one another. And it takes me time to kind of process what happened there. How do I forgive that? How do I tell her what I need? How do I own my part of it? And it takes time to do that, right? And time alone, sometimes away from them while you stay in touch with them. But ultimately, I really seek forgiveness with everybody because...
If you can't eventually forgive somebody, then you hurt yourself, I think, right? And I don't want to live my life hurting myself. So there's some people in my life I can even think from my way past who they did some things to really hurt me. Let's just say early 20s. But I forgive them, but I don't need to be in touch with them anymore, right?
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