The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Empowering women is the focus of Melinda Gates’s philanthropy. In her early years as a philanthropist, Gates primarily addressed global health. Her efforts to achieve equity in global health started in 1998 with a $100 million joint gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Children’s Vaccine Program. The following year, Bill and Melinda Gates gave $750 million to the GAVI Alliance to expedite the delivery of vaccines to the world’s poorest children, while the William H. Gates Foundation gave $25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the largest charitable gift to combat AIDS at that time. Melinda Gates continued to emphasize global health (alongside education) after the creation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, launching the $60 million Global Microbicide Project to combat particularly infectious diseases. Gates’s early efforts had a positive impact on maternal and childcare—but empowering women was never explicitly her goal.

Gates’s goal shifted over time. In 2014, she published an article in Science that detailed the foundation’s commitment to addressing gender inequity. The article promised that the foundation would “put women and girls at the center of global development” as they could not achieve their goals without systematically tackling gender inequity and meeting the specific needs of girls and women in the places they operated (189).