Background and career
Melinda Ann French Gates (née French; born August 15, 1964) is an American philanthropist. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, she attended Duke University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics and an MBA. She joined Microsoft in 1987 as a multimedia product developer. In the same year, she began dating the company's co-founder and then-chief executive Bill Gates, whom she married in 1994 and divorced in 2021. They have three children together. From 2000 to 2024, she and Gates co-chaired the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization. For their philanthropic endeavors, which focused on global health, development, and education, they received numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honour. After French Gates resigned as co-chair in 2024, Gates became sole chair of the renamed Gates Foundation. As part of her divorce settlement, French Gates received $12.5 billion for independent philanthropy, which she has stated will focus on women and families. She has become a prominent megadonor to the Democratic Party, with a focus on abortion rights, and endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 US presidential election. In 2025, she published a memoir, The Next Day: Transition, Change and Moving Forward. Consistently ranked by Forbes magazine as one of the world's most powerful women, French Gates was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2021. As of February 2026, her net worth is estimated at US$30.4 billion, making her the world's 72nd wealthiest person, according to Forbes.
Melinda Ann French was born on August 15, 1964, in Dallas, Texas. She is the second of four children born to Raymond Joseph French Jr., an aerospace engineer, and Elaine Agnes Amerland, a homemaker. She has an older sister and two younger brothers. French Gates, a Catholic, attended St. Monica Catholic School, where she was the valedictorian of her class. At age 14, French Gates was introduced to the Apple II by her father and Mrs. Bauer, a school teacher who advocated teaching computer science at the all-girls school. It was from this experience she developed her interest in computer games and the BASIC programming language. French Gates graduated as valedictorian from Ursuline Academy of Dallas in 1982. She earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics from Duke University in 1986 and an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School of Business in 1987. At Duke, French Gates was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, Beta Rho Chapter.
French Gates's first job was tutoring children in mathematics and computer programming. After graduation, she became a marketing manager with Microsoft, being responsible for the development of multimedia products. These included Microsoft Cinemania, Encarta, Publisher, Bob, Money, Works and Word. She worked on Expedia, which became one of the most popular travel booking websites. In the early 1990s, French Gates was appointed as general manager of Information Products, a position which she held until 1996. She left Microsoft that year, reportedly, to focus on starting a family.
French Gates served as a member of Duke University's board of trustees from 1996 to 2003. She attends the annual Bilderberg Group conference and has held a seat on the board of directors of Graham Holdings (formerly The Washington Post Company) since 2004. She was also on the board of directors at Drugstore.com but left in August 2006 to focus on philanthropic projects.
Since 2000, French Gates has been in the public eye, stating "As I thought about strong women of history, I realized that they stepped out in some way." This has allowed her work shaping and advancing the goals of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to be publicly recognized. By 2022, Bill and Melinda had given US$59.1 billion of their personal wealth to the foundation. On May 13, 2024, French Gates resigned as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to be effective June 7. The foundation was subsequently renamed the Gates Foundation, with Bill Gates as its sole chair. In 2015, French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures as a separate, independent organization to identify and implement innovative solutions to problems affecting U.S. women and families. In 2019, she committed to $US1 billion in funding, and in 2025 committed another $US1 billion. In October 2024, in partnership with Lever for Change, an affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation French Gates announced a 2024-25 grant competition called Action for Women's Health, which aims to provide $250 million in grants to fund women's health initiatives.. French Gates, whose net worth in 2025 was estimated at $US30 billion, has pledged to give away the majority of her wealth.
In 2019, French Gates debuted as an author with the book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. Former president Barack Obama starred in a comedy sketch to promote the book. The book highlights the failure to acknowledge women's unpaid work, drawing on feminist economist Dame Marilyn Waring's book If Women Counted. In 2025, she published the book The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, also through Flatiron Books.
