Melinda French Speaks Up On Why She Divorced Microsoft Co-founder, Bill Gates
Five years ago, billionaire philanthropist, Melinda French Gates stood at a crossroads.
After 27 years of marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, she decided to walk away in 2021, not only from a relationship that had defined much of her adult life, but eventually the philanthropic empire they built together.
Last spring, she left the Gates Foundation, the organization that had become the heartbeat of her professional identity.
While answering questions from Late Show host, Stephen Colbert, the business woman revealed why she “had to leave” her marriage to billionaire ex-husband, Gates.
According to the 60-year-old, she left because the marriage lacked honesty. She said the lack of honesty impacted their ability to “have intimacy.”
In her new book, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, Melinda takes readers inside the moments that have defined her — becoming a mother, grieving the loss of one of her best friends, and grappling with the hard-earned lessons of philanthropy.
She said:
“I learned to have a trusted relationship, which is what I wanted in marriage, both partners have to be honest with one another. And if you can’t, you can’t have intimacy and you can’t have trust. So in the end, I had to go.”
She continued:
“I mistakenly thought that philanthropy could change things more than it could. I didn’t realize that it takes philanthropy in concert with civil society and government — massive government funding — to change things.
If you really want to affect children’s lives around the world and get vaccines out, that takes enormous government funding. Philanthropy cannot do it on its own.
If you want to affect maternal health around the world, you really have to have philanthropy, again, taking on the experiments, trying things, figuring out what works, doing the research, but then it really takes government funding to scale those things up.”
On finding her voice with the Gates Foundation’s women’s health initiatives
I [would] go into a room with a prime minister or president and they would immediately turn to my ex-husband as if he was the expert on the foundation, when in fact he was still working at Microsoft and I’d been traveling more.
So I think in all of those sort of moments that happen or those slights, I started to lose who I was. … I was telling my kids to use their voice in the world and even to stand up to other people in school if there was a bully.
And I realized unless I was role modeling that, I wasn’t really living my values. And so it just felt really good. It felt like coming back to home over time.
On focusing the Foundation’s work on contraceptives
When I was working at the Foundation, I started to see through all my travels the difference that when a woman could space the births of her children, it made an enormous difference in the children’s health and being able to go to school and then ultimately the wealth of the family.
And yet I would meet so many women around the world who knew about contraceptives, but didn’t have access. And as I started to learn and study about it and … I learned the history of contraceptives and when women had had them and under what circumstances and when they hadn’t.
And I realized we needed to do something about this as a foundation. So I decided on the global stage: I’m going to set the agenda. Because for whatever reason, this has fallen off the global health agenda, and yet it’s vital for women and for babies.
We were losing — we still are — too many moms in childbirth because their babies were coming too close and too often, particularly in these low-income countries, and then the babies were dying as well.
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On wanting her kids to know they were loved, and lucky
I purposely put them in schools, I didn’t homeschool them. … I wanted to be part of the community. … When they were lucky enough to travel … we went out and saw what life was like for other kids.
And even in the Seattle community, we would go out and work with the homeless, work in a community shelter, be on the lines where they’re feeding people. And so my kids got to see, my gosh, aren’t we lucky? And to really think about their role in society. …
My kids got to see what life was like and that Seattle was this tiny speck on the map. I tried to ground them in that, ground them with chores, ground them with an allowance.
And the people who were helping me in and around the house, also people just with good values. So I did my best and I’m proud of all three of them. They’re all in their 20s now.
Melinda and Bill have three children together.