On Monday, Melinda French Gates resigned from the philanthropic organization she ran with her ex-husband Bill Gates.
That she left is less surprising than that she stayed so long. The couple divorced in 2021. In August 2021, the charity he told CNN that he is undergoing a two-year trial period to see if the two will find a way to proceed to work well together. They survived this era by almost a 12 months.
She said French Gates will walk away next month with an additional $12.5 billion. She wants to spend the money on “lifelong work for women and families.”
The Gates Foundation is famous for its projects helping the poor, especially in developing countries, reminiscent of fighting malaria, polio and improving sanitary conditions.
But I’m here to lobby for individuals who are considered pampered, not impoverished. According to them, female engineers working in the technology industry proceed to face shocking levels of mistreatment, resulting in greater than half of them leaving their firms, and often the technology industry. from the latest McKinsey report.
The technology industry is to blame “brilliant moron” Or “brother culture” an atmosphere that is not good for anyone, no matter gender, but especially crushes women to a pulp.
This was largely introduced by prototypes reminiscent of Bill Gates, who in his early years was famous for being strict and impatient, to the point that GQ once compared him to an “office tyrant.” Gates’ nemesis, Steve Jobs, had a famous status, as did other legendary billionaire founders with names like Larry and Charles.
Women in tech are bruised
IN Women in Technology 2024 Study72% of ladies reported experiencing a widespread “bro culture” at work, leading to microaggressions ranging from small talk during meetings (64%) to asking to “deliver food” to meetings (11%). Other research quantifies how women, no matter seniority, are often treated as lower-level worker nevertheless, in addition they receive less support, are more likely to be laid off and have fewer opportunities for promotion, and so on.
Working in such an environment is bruising! The woman who leads the hardware development team burst into tears when she told me how she had missed a meeting with her team’s biggest client. She was expected to prepare her boss for the meeting, and he contacted her and asked for information since she was sitting in a nearby office, but he was reluctant to invite her to the literal table.
There is a Reddit sub called r/womenintech that has over 21,000 members and whose constant topic is male co-workers who disrespect their work; or a consistently moving bar that blocks the promotion. “I have no hope for my ‘profession’ anymore. I really like working in IT, but the everlasting boys’ club has cured me of my ambitions and destroyed my mental health,” she wrote. one poster to a subscriber explaining why they are leaving the industry.
Many men feel the same way about the culture of the tech industry. There is a routine gigantic discussions on Hacker News about the misfortunes that will be expected in a programming profession.
Honestly, moving the tech industry (and corporate culture in general) beyond these deep, hostile roots is work French Gates has been doing since at least 2017, when she began investigating why so many women were leaving the occupation.
Through Pivotal Ventures, her own organization that she ran for many years before separating from Bill, she tries to address the root causes. Pivotal is a part of a enterprise capital fund of funds, which implies it invests in other VC funds; partly philanthropic; partly lobbying efforts; a part of every thing the billionaire wants to do. (Pivotal Ventures declined to comment.)
When French Gates said in her resignation letter that she intended to use her billions in latest capital to advocate for women, she suggested working on a broader spectrum: from body autonomy to investing in more women-led startups. For example, Pivotal partnered with Techstars on the project The way forward for the longevity accelerator which included a list of such startups. She supports women-led VC funds reminiscent of Miriam Rivera’s Ulu Ventures and Promise Phelon’s Growth Warrior Capital.
She is a supporter of family leave policies and modern care systems; mental health lobby; funds partners that provide greater diversity in technology and artificial intelligence; and is currently working to help more women win elections.
In an article on this topic appeared last 12 months in Time (owned, satirically, by one other male tech billionaire, Marc Benioff) wrote: “Ultimately, though, we can’t just force women into a broken system: we need to fix the system by addressing the full range of structural barriers that make that our government does not look like the people it is supposed to serve.”
The same applies to enterprise systems.
What more can Melinda French Gates do?
So what more can she – or any interested billionaire – do with the extra billions?
I imagine it is time for some form of staff’ bill of rights that eliminates the draconian contracts that the majority tech staff have to sign as a condition of employment, even at startups.
One sec Biden’s Federal Speech Act of 2022 makes many confidentiality and disparagement agreements relating to allegations of sexual assault or harassment unenforceable, all non-disparagement clauses ought to be abolished. Individuals should find a way to speak publicly about their personal experiences at work, good and bad, without fear of being sued by the company or receiving other punishment. Think how much more Susan Fowlers – Uber’s famous culture whistleblower – could be if people were free to express themselves. Even higher: think how the threat of speaking out could push people into positions of power to build cultures that did not need outings.
Another thing that needs to be removed: the draconian non-disclosure and non-disclosure agreements that terminated employees are forced to sign as a condition of severance pay.
Finally, I would really like to see corporate America end the secrecy surrounding staff’ compensation as one other area that can empower women and all staff.
Yes, that is a lot to ask one woman to do, considering every thing she already does. Even one other $12.5 billion won’t be enough to make people nicer to each other at work, because people are who they are. But the more pressure someone as powerful as Melinda French Gates can exert to change structures, the higher off we’ll all be.