Melinda French Gates is an American philanthropist and co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with husband, Bill Gates, whom she divorced in 2021. She consistently ranks among the world’s most powerful women (Forbes). Trained as a computer scientist, Gates began her career in 1987 as a marketing manager at Microsoft, then a fledgling company. She rose through the ranks until she became General Manager of Information Products, a position she held until leaving the company in 1996 to focus on her family. Shortly after having her first child, Gates began searching for professional projects that would allow her to have a career and raise children, marking her turn toward philanthropy. She and her husband started their foundation in 2000 by merging the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation. With an endowment of nearly $50 billion, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest charitable organization in the world (Wikipedia).

Gates’s Catholic faith underlies her philanthropic work, which initially centered on global health. Many of the foundation’s early projects focused on maternal and childhood health in developing countries. In addition to vaccination campaigns, the foundation worked to give millions of women worldwide access to contraceptives.