Melinda French Gates donates $215 million to improve women’s health worldwide

Philanthropist Melinda French Gates will expand her giving to improve women’s health globally, pledging another $215 million to support access to contraception and maternity care, as well as initiatives targeting middle-aged women, including more studies on menopause.

The new funding announced Thursday pushes French Gates’ donations to women’s health to more than $600 million in the past two years.

French Gates told The Associated Press in an interview that women’s health is a cornerstone of the work she does through Pivotal, the group of organizations she founded to handle her philanthropy and investments. “It’s blatantly clear that women’s health is key — they have to be healthy in order to do well in life,” French Gates said.

Since 2024, when she left the Gates Foundation, which she founded with her ex-husband Bill Gates, and became one of the world’s largest private funders of health care, French Gates has strengthened her approach to supporting women.

This latest round of funding reflects an increasingly strategic approach to areas it feels are underfunded. This includes a $40 million donation to Co-Impact for an initiative integrating mental health support into maternity and primary care, particularly in Africa. French Gates hopes that her $10 million donation to the Menopause Society to improve menopause care in the United States, by educating health care practitioners and expanding outreach in areas where care is limited, will encourage other funders to start working on the issue.

According to the World Economic Forum, although women make up half the population, health issues that specifically affect them receive only 2% of private health care dollars. Lack of funding has led to a shortage of products and services designed to treat them.

“The role of philanthropy, in my view, is to look at some of these societal problems that are being left behind, highlight them, and show ways to make progress so you can then mobilize other donors and ultimately mobilize government funding,” she said. “Part of what I’m doing here, I hope, is sending a signal to say: ‘This is really important. Let’s do something about it.’ And I hope I can get others to join me.”

The United States currently has about 6,000 counties where patients have very low access to doctors who specialize in treating menopause, said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director of the Menopause Society and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health. She said the donation would allow the Menopause Society to bring its educational resources to more areas of the country that need them.

“Menopause remains one of the most overlooked and underserved areas of medicine, and the Menopause Society believes women deserve better,” Faubion said. “We are ready to make these changes with the support of donors like Pivotal.”

Research into menopause treatments was already underfunded, even before the recent medical research cuts passed by President Donald Trump’s administration took effect.

“I think philanthropy is going to play a bigger role than ever before because we won’t get the same kind of government funding that we did before,” she said. “Funding is hard to come by these days – much harder than it used to be. And the need for it has not gone away. We still have to do the research one way or another.”

Faubion said the sheer size of French Gates’ gift is important, but the attention it brings may be even more important.

“This shows that someone like Melinda Gates and Pivotal feels this is an important issue,” Faubion said. “It will highlight the gaps that still exist… and make people not only aware, but perhaps motivated to take some action.”

For French Gates, bringing more attention to women’s issues is as important as increasing funding allocated to them.

“I want women’s health issues to not be invisible,” she said. “I don’t want the default to be that women are expected to deal with pain and suffering. I want them to be seen for what they’re going through, their real life experiences, and for those issues to be addressed so they can live their best lives.”