MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates and the Case for Walking Away

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This article was originally published on January 20, 2022.

When the Bill and Melinda French Gates announced their divorce last year, the news prompted a lot of speculation, much of it wishful thinking, that French Gates would walk the same path as MacKenzie Scott. Freed from their previous matrimonial bonds, the two women would join forces as a kind of philanthropic dream team and joyously proceed to upend sector norms. 

Now, we’re learning that narrative might not be all that far-fetched. There has indeed been some collaboration between Scott, French Gates and their teams, and that collaboration may be quite extensive, according to recent reporting by Teddy Schleifer at Puck. 

In a dive into some of the mechanisms making up Scott’s secretive giving operation, Schleifer writes, “Scott’s and French Gates’ teams, including the principals, have grown quite close and talk regularly.” He adds, “Melinda’s team played a pivotal role in helping MacKenzie get set up in the early days.”

The details of that role are still hazy. Despite reporters’ intrepid efforts, the wall of privacy around Scott’s giving remains nigh-impenetrable. Nevertheless, the two women have partnered publicly on one project, the $40 million Equality Can’t Wait challenge, focused on gender equity. It’s a powerful suggestion that a future where French Gates and Scott work together would be a good future for nonprofits serving women and girls. After all, these apex givers have the kind of resources that could ramp up that $40 million by a factor of a thousand.

The big question hanging over any such collaboration is whether French Gates will remain active at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses’ divorce and Warren Buffett’s subsequent departure has led to an atmosphere of high tension at the philanthropic behemoth, and a curious arrangement that’ll see French Gates move in one of two directions. Either she stays on at the foundation, having achieved a passable working relationship with her former husband, or she goes her own way, receiving capital from the Gates fortune to use for her philanthropy (Bloomberg reports she already has about $11.4 billion to her name). 

Whatever path French Gates takes, organizations serving women and girls will surely benefit. She’s already prioritizing those causes at Pivotal Ventures, her LLC funding vehicle, and as she “learned how to step up and be an equal” at the Gates Foundation over the years (and over Bill’s objections, apparently), the foundation has become a steadfast gender equity funder. Last year, we took a look at some of the ways French Gates could transform philanthropy for women and girls—there are quite a few. 

Still, many have cast French Gates’ potential departure as a sign of just how much Bill Gates remains preponderant at the foundation they both built. Perhaps it is that. But if she does choose to leave—or, more pessimistically, is obliged to leave—that might not be such a bad thing. It might even be better.

Just for argument’s sake, consider an alternative world where Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos chose to emulate Melinda and Bill’s approach while they were married. Rather than waiting until Amazon owned the world to start their big-time giving, the Bezoses launch the Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos Foundation shortly after Amazon goes public in 1997. Fattened on the e-commerce giant’s skyrocketing stock, the foundation grows into one of the world’s largest grantmakers over the next two decades, with an endowment in the tens of billions and teeming staff working out of offices spanning the globe. 

In that alternate timeline, imagine the Bezos Foundation gets into environmental funding and economic empowerment at Jeff’s direction, embattled over obvious contradictions (reminiscent of CZI and Facebook)—Amazon’s vast, gas-guzzling fleet, its union-busting, and poor treatment of workers. That picture is complicated further as MacKenzie begins asserting her place at the foundation, directing substantial arts funding toward smaller community groups, most of them led by and serving under-resourced communities of color. The foundation also gets into higher ed, moving money to community colleges, trade schools, and, at a clip never seen before, to historically Black colleges and universities. This giving is generous, and reminiscent of the MacKenzie Scott philanthropy we know today, but it also provides more reserved, slow-moving project support, bound by a massive philanthropic institution. 

Fast-forward to 2019. Jeff and MacKenzie call it quits. MacKenzie Scott now faces a decision. Does she continue at the Bezos Foundation—which she helped build—in a strained partnership with her former husband? Or does she strike a different path? I suspect it would be hard to walk away. And if she stuck with the hypothetical Bezos Foundation, I don’t know that we would see the groundbreaking kind of philanthropy she’s carrying out today. It’s a little odd to puzzle over what are typically private matters, but we’re talking about personal decisions with the potential to reshape the philanthrosphere.

Returning to our own timeline, if French Gates and her team did play some role in the development of Scott’s boundary-pushing giving strategy (and even if they didn’t), Scott undoubtedly had the Gates Foundation in mind as she set about her project. Scott’s giving is both an evolution on the Gateses’ high-dollar, give-while-you-live ethos, as well as a kind of rebuke of the Gates Foundation’s massive staff, often restrictive grants, and less progressive attitude. 

French Gates could, of course, do both—continue on as a trustee of the Gates Foundation and deploy her own funds in a less conventional way through a much-beefed-up Pivotal Ventures. But there’s a case to be made for walking away and starting afresh, not with a clean slate, exactly, but with a new mandate. 

Back in 2018, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy published a report on the role of social norms in encouraging giving for women and girls. Funded, funnily enough, by the Gates Foundation, the report found that “when people believe that others are interested in giving to women’s and girls’ causes, they have greater intentions to donate to these causes themselves.” In particular, social messages about rising levels of giving tend to correlate with higher giving for women’s and girls’ causes, and that’s true for both female and male givers. 

In a time of threats to progress on gender equity—from the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women workers to the whittling away of abortion rights—a narrative of rising support hasn’t really materialized. In fact, the opposite narrative has been given fuel. Imagine the impact if two apex philanthropists, both with symbolic personal stories, joined forces to fund gender equity in a major and sustained way. Imagine if French Gates encouraged Scott to further prioritize gender equity, and simultaneously incorporated Scott’s no-strings-attached philosophy in her own funding.

That should count, as little else could, as a powerful message about rising levels of giving. And it would be a compelling argument that Scott’s way of giving isn’t just a fluke, but a pattern, a trend—maybe even the future of philanthropy. Wishful thinking?