Talk about putting one’s money where their mouth is.
Philanthropist and former tech exec Melinda French Gates has announced that she will be committing $1 billion toward advancing women’s power throughout the world.
She announced the new initiative through Pivotal Ventures, the investment company and incubator she launched in 2015. And her reasoning for the donation is simple: “Decades of research on economics, wellbeing, and governance make it clear that investing in women and girls benefits everyone,” she noted in a press release.
The money will be split into a series of smaller funds in amounts ranging from $125 million and $250 million, that will address problems that plague women from a variety of angles. One fund, amounting to $150 million, will specifically focus on women’s workplace woes.
After surveying roughly 4,500 working women and nonbinary individuals on what plagues them professionally, the investment firm found that “if we want to expand women’s power and influence … then we must tackle the unfinished business of inequality at work,” a Pivotal representative said in a statement emailed to The Story Exchange.
To get specific, those inequalities include a broad lack of support for caregivers, environments rife with harassment or bias, and a lack of career pipeline for women looking to advance.
The funds will seek to topple those barriers by propping up the work of organizations that specialize in easing such burdens. For example, a not-insignificant portion of the money – $45 million – will be dedicated specifically to helping women working in technology, especially AI technology, by funding the missions of outfits that diversify the tech world by way of educational and mentorship programs like Rewriting the Code, Break Through Tech and Lift Our Voices.
Through this mass funding effort, Gates hopes to ensure that women keep moving forward – never back. “Women’s representation in the workforce has increased substantially over the last few years,” she said on Pivotal’s site. “Unless we remove … barriers, we will never achieve true gender equality. And we risk losing the precious progress we’ve already made.”
