Jenn and Melinda made their own trip this year to Louisiana, using up the last days of Jenn’s maternity leave. “The purpose was really just to learn firsthand from legislators, from providers, and from patients,” Jenn says. They spoke to women who were looking for basic care, mothers who had lost their babies, providers whose patients relied primarily on Medicare, and med-school educators. “This is all part of this belief,” Melinda adds deliberately, as if to allow an unspoken urgency to fill the gaps between her words, “that women should have much better access to health care.”
Indeed, days before we meet, Melinda has announced a $100 million investment through Pivotal, the philanthropic endeavor she launched in 2015, and the global health nonprofit Wellcome Leap. The funds will support research into diseases and disorders that disproportionately affect women (80 percent of patients with autoimmune disorders are women, for example). Another recent effort involves her daughters: The three Gates women are founding donors of the Women’s Health Co-Lab run by Iconiq Impact, the philanthropy platform of investment firm Iconiq. It will disperse, initially, $70 million to organizations focused on maternal health, sexual and reproductive health, and gender-based violence (the intent is to invest $100 million total). According to Matti Navellou, the head of Iconiq Impact, conversations with Phoebe were critical to getting the project off the ground. “We’re in a situation now where not only are we regressing in some areas of women’s health and rights, but the funding just isn’t there,” says Navellou. “Of course, it helps when you have a recognized name with the credibility of the Gates family, for example, to bring folks out of the sidelines…. It makes a huge difference.”
Another thing that comes across, sitting with these women, is that no matter your resources or background, no matter if you are giving away millions or raising money for the PTA, parenting is a profound and humbling leveler. Melinda writes in her memoir from earlier this year, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, of leaving a Seattle hospital with newborn Jenn, and in those first days at home, experiencing an earthquake. “I realized I would have died for her that night,” she writes. “Here was undeniable evidence that, at the center of my heaving chest, pulsing from my hammering heart, was a force that hadn’t existed there before: a maternal love so primal and ferocious it was almost violent.” (Melinda is a reader as well as a writer, says her book editor Will Schwalbe. When they met in New York for sandwiches and iced tea in the unglamorous downstairs restaurant in the publisher’s building, he asked her what she was reading. He remembers she pulled two books—The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo and a novel by Ann Patchett—from her bag.)
For Melinda, parenting meant stepping away from her career at Microsoft. She wanted to be as “present for them as my mother was for me,” she writes in her memoir. Even when her work for what was then called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (launched in 2000) began to dominate her attention, she set parameters. She wouldn’t conduct work calls when her kids were in the car, for instance—a rule she adhered to until one day she had to drive Phoebe and Rory across town to pick up a (second) puppy, and there was a discussion about personnel management that couldn’t wait. But overhearing her mother was a revelation, Phoebe says: “I remember you talking about building the right team and finding the right people. I remember being so young, but being able to soak up some of those lessons.” Phoebe’s start-up Phia has raised $8 million in seed funding from investors like Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg, among others. “I’m so grateful that I had an example of a mom who was out there in the world doing good and working,” adds Jenn. “I hope that my girls also see that I’m working and enjoying what I’m doing outside of them.”
