In today’s edition: the rise of political violence, a widening gender pay gap, and Fortune’s Lila MacLellan chats with Melinda French Gates about her latest society-shifting investment. “I grew up in a household where my mom said, ‘Set your own agenda, or someone else will,’” Melinda French Gates told me yesterday morning, minutes after stepping off the stage at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in New York.
The billionaire philanthropist had just announced a key
post-Gates Foundation plank in her long-held agenda of
advancing women’s power globally. She outlined
a $100 million investment in women’s health research that will center on conditions that are most overlooked but the biggest drivers of death and morbidity for women.
The plan is to investigate issues across a woman’s lifespan, focusing on areas such as cardiovascular disease, autoimmune conditions, and mental health, including depression and PTSD. Last year, French Gates also put out
an open call for women’s health nonprofits to apply for $250 million in grants, and those proposals are now being vetted. “This isn’t the last you’re going to hear from me on women’s health, either,” French Gates told me. “It’s too fundamental. It’s where women’s lives begin, so they can go do everything they want to do.”
“We’ve asked women for far too long to deal with a lot of pain and suffering,” French Gates said.
A central goal of the new fund is to find solutions quickly, and to encourage treatment development within years, rather than decades, French Gates explained. To that end, her Pivotal Ventures is partnering with Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit health research network led by Regina Dugan, the first woman to lead the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Each group contributed $50 million to this investment.
The Gates Foundation, which French Gates is no longer working with, recently announced its own effort on women’s health—
a $2.5 billion commitment.
Launched in 2020, Wellcome Leap has already begun researching issues such as stillbirths, heavy menstrual bleeding, and the role menopause plays in Alzheimer’s risk, using a model similar to DARPA’s—it leverages global, interdisciplinary teams at institutions around the world, sets tight timelines, and takes an agile approach. The new partnership’s programs, which will start in 2026, should yield results within three to five years, French Gates and Dugan said.
Melinda Gates speaks during the 2025 Forbes Power Women’s Summit. Taylor Hill/Getty ImagesFrench Gates is confident that pushes like this will attract the support of public and private stakeholders for humanitarian reasons alone, but there’s also an obvious economic argument. “If you’re a business leader for a small company, a medium company, or a Fortune 500, you want the women in your workforce—usually they are half your workforce—to bring their full creativity, their full vitality, their full energy to whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve in business,” she told me. “But if they have to be out because they’re dealing with a chronic health issue or they’re dealing with a cardiovascular event that no one can figure out, that’s a loss of business productivity.”
To be sure, it’s not the easiest time to launch this ambitious work. In the United States, political division has led to abortion bans in several states, well-funded conservative activist groups have been attacking diversity and equity, and misinformation campaigns have led some Americans to question everything from vaccines to the safety of
the birth control pill.
But French Gates says she’s not concerned about political friction impeding the fund’s progress. “We’re talking about women’s health, something we all know is important,” she said. “And we’re talking about basic scientific research.”
“This money is in our hands to decide what to do with it,” she added, “and we’re moving forward.”
Lila MacLellanlila.maclellan@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe. Subscribe here.
