Melinda French Gates launches a $250 million women’s health fund

Melinda French Gates is shedding more light on her $1 billion plan to promote women’s rights, announcing Wednesday a new $250 million fund to improve women’s mental and physical health.

The billionaire philanthropist launched “Action for Women’s Health”, a fund through her organization Pivotal Ventures. Its webpage says that “women’s health has been underfunded, overlooked, and misunderstood” and that health inequities between men and women “not only impact women’s daily lives, but they can also hurt women’s futures.”

“It’s clear we need to do a better job of addressing the barriers to women’s health. The good news is that there are so many organizations around the world doing just that. We want to ensure they get the attention and funding they deserve,” according to the webpage, which directs interested organizations to apply to receive a share of funding.

French Gates previously said that after the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that let individual states decide abortion rights, the philanthropist felt compelled to offer Americans financial support for their reproductive freedoms, an issue she had been supporting internationally.

“While I have long focused on improving contraceptive access overseas, in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home,” French Gates said in a May op-ed in the New York Times. “For too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women’s rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.”

She reiterated that Wednesday in a new interview with Bloomberg. “We’re seeing the devastating impacts” of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion rights case, being overturned, French Gates told the publication. “I would like to see the US never, never roll back a law — or any country — related to women’s health.”

French Gates previously endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a CBS News interview in July, a position she reiterated Wednesday. Harris, the Democratic nominee for US president, has been vocal about women’s reproductive rights.

“When you think about who understands the US right now — who understands women’s needs right now — there are stark contrasts,” she told Bloomberg. “I thought it was worth speaking out about my feelings on that.”

French Gates is one of the world’s wealthiest and most prominent philanthropists and resigned from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in June, an organization she helped create more than two decades ago.

As part of her divorce agreement with Bill Gates, she received $12.5 billion from the foundation for her work upon her resignation, and she would go on to focus her philanthropic efforts on women and girls.