Since she left the Gates Foundation earlier this year, Melinda French Gates has been making some noise. In the last few weeks alone, she sat down with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show,” had a long conversation with the New York Times, launched an interview program on YouTube and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. She even took a polite swipe at some of her male billionaire counterparts, including Elon Musk, Bill Ackman and Peter Thiel, telling the New York Times that they “have not been very philanthropic yet. They use their voice and they use their megaphones, but I would not call those men philanthropists.”
French Gates appears to be enjoying herself as she speaks more forcefully about politics, including reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned. As she told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “… all the downstream effects that are coming and will continue to come from that decision are so severe, I thought, you know, if I really believe in women in our country and women’s rights, I need to speak up.”
But her philanthropic and investment LLC, Pivotal Ventures, has been focused on the rights of girls, women and families since it got up and running back in 2015, and it has been increasing those commitments since French Gates announced her departure from the Gates Foundation.
French Gates’ commitment of $1 billion through 2026 in May — which adds to a previous $1 billion already flowing through Pivotal — saw her center women’s rights in a major way, and gesture not so subtly at the current fraught political climate in the U.S. Pivotal has also made other recent investments in youth mental and physical health, caregiving, and challenges facing men and boys, as IP has reported. And French Gates has a lot more financial horsepower to draw upon: In addition to a net worth Forbes currently puts at $10.5 billion, her break with the Gates Foundation came with another $12.5 billion for her philanthropic endeavors.
It should come as no surprise that building women’s political power is another primary Pivotal Ventures focus area – and one it’s in a prime position to pursue, given its ability, as an LLC, to range well beyond strict 501(c)(3) funding. Pivotal’s approach to the issue is multifaceted, according to Haven Ley, Pivotal Ventures’ chief strategy officer. “It’s really about eliminating barriers to women running for office, training women running for office, and thinking about policy changes so that women are more successful, so they can run, win and lead,” she said.
It is work that seems more relevant than ever in an election year — particularly a year that could see the election of the country’s first woman president.
An ‘aha’ moment
Today, more women hold office in the U.S. than ever before, but their numbers still lag significantly behind those of men. Twelve women currently serve as state governors — a record high, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, but that’s out of 50 in total. Women hold 25 out of 100 Senate seats, and only 125, or 28.7%, of 435 seats in the House.
Nicole Sawran, Pivotal Ventures’ senior director for advocacy and public affairs, said that discrepancy came into sharp focus after congressional negotiations over President Biden’s Build Back Better legislative package, when many of the provisions that would have the most impact on women and families didn’t survive the process.
“There were pieces of legislation that were really important, including finally passing a national paid leave policy, more supports for childcare, additional supports for long-term care services and eldercare,” she said. “And all those got left on the cutting floor. That isn’t to say that Build Back Better wasn’t really important, but the issues that were being championed by the women in Congress and that would have had the most impact on women were the ones that got left behind.”
That was an “aha” moment, according to Sawran. “It’s one thing to elect women, but they need to also have power. There were people like Senator Patty Murray and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and certainly Speaker Pelosi, who advocated really hard, they were huge champions. But you know, at the end of the day, there just weren’t enough of them.” (Kamala Harris has promised to reintroduce Build Back Better’s “caring economy” plans if elected.)
Pivotal Ventures is working to boost women’s representation on a number of fronts. It supports organizations that are building the ranks of women in politics, including Vote Run Lead, which trains women to run for office, “reaching over 55,000 women across America,” according to its website. Close to 60% of the women the organization has worked with are women of color, and 20% are from rural areas. Pivotal also supports The Pipeline Fund, a network that aims to increase and diversify the number of progressive leaders “running and winning at every level of the ballot, everywhere.”
“Change something”
Sawran pointed to obstacles that women in particular face as public servants, both as candidates and political officials. “We’re looking at the systematic and structural barriers that prevent women from either wanting to run in the first place or succeeding once they’re in office,” she said. “Melinda herself has talked about the fact that we can’t just support more women to go into these roles that were really never created with them in mind.” She pointed to obstacles like a lack of available childcare, and low — or even nonexistent — legislative salaries that make it difficult to hold office unless you’re independently wealthy.
Pivotal Ventures supports the Vote Mama Foundation, which advocates for mothers who are running for and holding office. When the organization’s founder, Liuba Grechen Shirley, was running for Congress, she had two young children, and covering their care was a financial stretch. She petitioned the Federal Elections Commission to authorize the use of campaign funds for childcare, and was successful. Vote Mama is now working to introduce and pass similar measures in all 50 states.
Safety is another issue for women seeking and holding political office. Pivotal supported a Brennan Center for Justice report, published earlier this year, that charted rising political threats and intimidation of state and local office-holders across the country. The report found that women and people of color “experience outsize effects of hostility on their personal and public lives.”
Sawran predicted that we’ll see more of that kind of hostility as the election heats up. “I think certainly having a woman of color at the very top of the ticket right now will surface a lot… in terms of gender attacks and racial attacks, and even just the passive stuff — the more nuanced things that still cut deep and become a disincentive to other women who want to run.”
The States United Democracy Center, yet another Pivotal partner, aims to protect elections and voting rights, and works with and on behalf of state and local election officials. More than 80% of local election officials are women, pointed out Joanna Lydgate, the center’s president and CEO, in a blog post on Pivotal’s website. She describes the center’s work helping election officials defend election results in court, connecting election officials to law enforcement leaders, providing officials with tools to fight disinformation, and making sure that those who violate election law are held accountable. “This is the work of supporting free and fair elections,” she wrote. “It’s also the work of supporting women. In this job, I’m constantly reminded that they are the same goal.”
In another recent initiative, Pivotal Ventures partnered with Cosmopolitan for a reporting project, published in May, called “How to Succeed in Office,” which explored some of the barriers women face when they run for office — and the obstacles they continue to face when they get there. The package includes an introduction by Stacey Abrams and a poll of Gen Z women to find out their views on challenges and opportunities for women in politics.
It also includes an interview with Melinda French Gates that pointed to some differences in the way women govern and their motivations for doing so. She quoted one female legislator who told her, “Some people get into politics to be someone, but women get into politics to change something.”
Prerequisite to progress
In a recent article for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Brooke Anderson, Pivotal Ventures’ president, pointed out that women are still underrepresented in most of the country’s power centers — not only in politics, but in tech and venture capital, as well — “and in every case, women of color are even more underrepresented than white women,” she wrote. “That’s why, at Pivotal, we see expanding women’s power and influence not as a single issue but rather as a prerequisite to progress on more or less every issue.”
This position isn’t new at Pivotal Ventures, and for French Gates, whose recent philanthropic ramp-up was prefaced by giving through avenues like Equality Can’t Wait, a $40 million philanthropic contest aimed at expanding women’s power and influence in the U.S. Pivotal funded the challenge alongside MacKenzie Scott and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, and it wrapped in 2021 with four winners whose work ranges across fields like tech and corporate impact, as well as expanding economic opportunities for Indigenous women.
In her article, Anderson went on to argue that more women in every sector will improve those sectors. “If women were proportionately represented in these areas, our technology would be more innovative, our politics would engage a whole new range of issues, and our companies would serve the needs of many more customers.”
The same could be said for philanthropy, which is yet another sector that has been traditionally dominated by men. In her recent conversation with the New York Times, French Gates was asked if she thinks women give differently than men, and she responded that it’s too early to say.
“It’s only been in the last decade that you’re seeing women really come into their own in philanthropy,” she said. “ I mean, we have a hundred years of history in philanthropy before that, but it was really the men who controlled the resources. And I even see it still with couples who are married, quite honestly. Some of the women talk about, they still have to go to their husband to get permission to do certain things they want to do in philanthropy. So give us another 25 years, and then ask me the question again.”
In the meantime, philanthropy could use some shaking up, and it’s exciting to see Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott and other women stepping up and representing.
