In Case You Missed It, Struggling Men and Boys Are Also on Melinda French Gates’ Radar

Now that she’s made her official exit from the Gates Foundation, all eyes are on where Melinda French Gates will take her own giving in the years ahead. Her announcement last month that she’ll move an additional $1 billion out the door through 2026 cemented what was already apparent: French Gates is now one of the leading U.S. philanthropists for women’s and girls’ causes.

Her concern for backsliding women’s rights, here and abroad, is clear, and she communicated it powerfully: “As shocking as it is to contemplate, my one-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had.”

Unsurprisingly, organizations and individuals focused on averting that possibility made up the lion’s share of the recipients French Gates announced last month. Still, she’s giving away a lot of money to a lot of people, and as she expands her women’s rights largesse, it’s been easy to overlook two subcommitments that are aimed, at least in part, at issues confronting men.

As one piece of her overall commitment, French Gates is giving some $240 million to “a diverse group of 12 global leaders,” with each recipient getting $20 million to distribute to charitable organizations of their choice working to “improve women’s health and wellbeing in the U.S. and around the world.” Interestingly, not just one but two of those leaders, Richard V. Reeves and Gary Barker, lead organizations tackling the fraught question of what to do for struggling men and boys, and how to do it in a gender-equity-forward way.

I last wrote about Reeves and the philanthropic context around giving for men and boys around the time the former Brookings fellow published his 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.” Provoking copious commentary and some criticism, Reeves’ overall point — which he reiterated following French Gates’ commitment — has been that as we work to defend women’s rights and promote gender equity, we can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that men’s issues (and as a guy, I know there are a lot of those) must be a part of that picture.

While the majority of philanthropic money is controlled by men and goes toward work led by men, specific funding to tackle “men’s issues” is sparse. Meanwhile, it’s clear that many men and boys are struggling in the U.S., especially those who are otherwise underprivileged. Reeves cites plenty of examples, such as a drop-off in college enrollment, high unemployment among men with only a high school education, and the fact that “deaths of despair” (such as suicide and drug overdoses) affect men at far higher rates they do women.

By selecting Reeves, who founded and leads the American Institute for Boys and Men, as well as Gary Barker, who does the same at Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, as two of her 12 regranting leaders, French Gates is signaling that she understands the intersectionalities at play in her broader push for women’s empowerment. (Note that an LGBTI advocacy leader, economist M. V. Lee Badgett, was also tapped to distribute $20 million.)

What Reeves and Barker do with the money still needs to benefit women in some way, but French Gates is also signaling here that she’s open to further funding the men and boys space in the future. But regardless, this is still kind of a big deal in itself. The scale of top billionaire philanthropy is such that these commitments were buried in the larger news of $1 billion heading out the door, but imagine if this were a separate announcement: “Melinda French Gates Gives $40 Million to Men and Boys’ Advocates to Distribute as They Choose.”

Whether or not this ends up becoming a notable part of French Gates’ overall gender equity giving, what might this move tell us about her evolving philanthropy?

Well, it’s clear at the very least that French Gates likes covering her bases. Unlike MacKenzie Scott, who, until recently, gave in one particular if groundbreaking way, and unlike the many billionaires who set up standard foundations and give to standard causes, French Gates has been keen on adopting a whole host of strategies to give away her dollars.

Her recent announcement pairs this individual leader regranting approach with a more typical program of organizational support (though atypical in that recipients are getting unrestricted funding), and, last but not least, with a forthcoming open call that brings to mind Scott’s recently concluded competition. Moreover, Pivotal Ventures is itself set up as an LLC to give it greater leeway to make both nonprofit and for-profit investments, as well as to engage in political funding.

Is French Gates’ giving through Reeves and Barker just another extension of that all-of-the-above mindset — or, as the cynics might have it, an exercise in checking off boxes? Even if it is, it’s also a sign that going forward, she’ll be looking to build alliances rather than burn bridges, and tackle threats to women’s rights while affirming that positive outcomes for women, men and gender nonconforming people need not be a zero-sum game.

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