On Monday, Melinda French Gates resigned from the charity she ran with her ex-husband, Bill Gates.
That he left is less surprising than that he stayed as long as he did. The couple divorced in 2021. In August 2021, the charity he told CNN that he did a two-year trial period to see if the two could continue to work well together. They surpassed this period by almost a year.
French Gates will walk away next month with an additional $12.5 billion, he said. She wants to dedicate this money to her “lifelong work on behalf of women and families.”
The Gates Foundation famously works on projects to help poor people, especially in developing countries, such as fighting malaria, polio or improving sanitation.
But I’m here to push for people who are considered spoiled, not poor. Women engineers in tech still face a shocking level of mistreatment that causes more than half of them to leave their companies, and often the tech industry, in a recent McKinsey report.
The famous tech industry is to blame “Great Jerk” the “Sister culture” atmosphere that is not great for anyone of any gender, but especially emasculates women.
And it was largely introduced by prototypes like Bill Gates, who was famously tough and impatient in his early years, so much so that GQ once likened him to “an office bully.” Gates’ nemesis, Steve Jobs, had his own famous reputation, as did other legendary billionaire founders with names like Larry and Charles.
Women in tech are bruised
In a 2024 Women in Tech Survey, 72% of women reported experiencing a pervasive “sister culture” at work that leads to microaggressions ranging from talking down during meetings (64%) to being asked to “provide the food” for meetings (11%). But research quantifies how women, regardless of seniority, are often treated as a lower level worker However, they also receive less support, are more likely to be fired and less likely to be promoted, etc.
Working in such an environment is bruising! A woman who runs a hardware development team teared up when she told me how she was left out of a meeting with her team’s biggest customer. She was expected to prepare her boss for the meeting, and he kept contacting her to ask for information as she sat at her nearby desk, but not inviting her to the literal table.
There’s a subreddit of Reddit called r/womenintech that has over 21,000 members in which a consistent theme is dealing with male colleagues who belittle their work. or a constantly moving bar that blocks a promotion. “I feel no hope for my ‘career’ anymore. I love the IT job but the perpetual boys club has cured me of my ambition and ruined my mental health,’ she wrote a poster in sub-explaining why he is leaving the industry.
Many men feel the same way about the culture of the tech industry. There are routines giant discussions on Hacker News about the misery one can expect in a coding career.
To be fair, moving the tech industry (and corporate culture in general) beyond these deep, hostile roots is work that French Gates has been doing since at least 2017, when she began researching why so many women are leaving the profession .
Through Pivotal Ventures, her own organization she ran for many years before splitting from Bill, she tries to address the root causes. Pivotal is part of venture capital, meaning it invests in other VC funds. part charitable; partial lobbying effort; split whatever else the billionaire wants to do. (Pivotal Ventures declined to comment.)
When French Gates said in her resignation letter that she would use her new cache of billions to work in the service of women, she implied that she would work on a broader spectrum: everything from body autonomy to investing in more startups. For example, Pivotal partnered with Techstars to a Future of Longevity Accelerator which contained a list of such startups. She backs women-led VC funds such as Miriam Rivera’s Ulu Ventures and Promise Phelon’s Growth Warrior Capital.
He is a strong supporter of family leave policies and modern care systems. Lobbying for mental health; funding partners bringing more diversity to tech and AI; and now working to help more women win elections.
In one commented on this topic last year for Time (owned, ironically enough, by another male tech billionaire, Marc Benioff), wrote: “Ultimately, though, we can’t keep forcing women into a broken system: We have to fix the system, addressing all the range of structural barriers that prevent our government from resembling the people it is meant to serve.”
The same goes for enterprise systems.
What else can Melinda French Gates do?
So what else can she — or any other interested billionaire — do with her extra slice of billions?
I think it’s time for some sort of worker’s rights bill that eliminates the draconian contracts that most tech workers have to sign as a condition of employment, even at startups.
While Biden’s federal Speak Out Act of 2022 renders many non-disclosure, non-disparagement agreements unenforceable for allegations of sexual assault or harassment, all non-disparagement clauses should be struck out. Individuals should be free to speak publicly about their personal experiences at work, good or bad, without fear of being sued by the company or other punishment. Think how many more Susan Fowlers – Uber’s famous culture whistleblower – there would be if people felt free to speak up. Even better: Consider how the threat of open speech could push people into positions of power to build cultures that didn’t need field trips.
Another thing that needs to go: draconian non-disclosure, non-disparagement agreements that laid-off workers are forced to sign as a condition of severance pay.
And finally, I’d like to see corporate America end the secrecy around workers’ compensation as another area that will empower women and all workers.
Yes, it’s a lot to ask a woman to do, given all she already does. And even another $12.5 billion won’t be enough to make people kinder to each other at work because people are who they are. But the more pressure someone as powerful as Melinda French Gates can bring to change the structures, the better off we’ll all be.
Have a tip for a tough tech company or startup culture you experience? Contact Julie Bort via e-mail, X/Twitter or Signal at 970-430-6112.
