Melinda French Gates was born in Dallas in 1964, trained as a computer scientist at Duke and built her early career at Microsoft, where she met her then-husband Bill Gates. She co-founded what became the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and served as its co-chair until 2024.
Through Pivotal Ventures, founded in 2015, and her ongoing philanthropic work she has focused on the economic position of women in the United States and globally, including commitments of several billion dollars to organizations advancing women's rights, reproductive health, child care infrastructure and political participation.
Her published writing on the role of women in development has shaped how a generation of philanthropists thinks about gender as a cross-cutting variable in nearly every development outcome.