The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward

Melinda French Gates is an American philanthropist. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, she was educated at Ursuline Academy of Dallas, Duke University, and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Duke in computer science and economics in 1986 and an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987, Melinda joined Microsoft as a marketing manager and eventually became a general manager, leading the development of many of the company’s multimedia products.

Shortly after joining Microsoft in 1987 as a multimedia product developer, she began dating the company’s co-founder and then-CEO Bill Gates, whom she married in 1994. They have three children together. The couple divorced in 2021—a transition that features heavily in French Gates’s thematic exploration of the Balance Between Independence and Interdependence. She left Microsoft in 1996 to focus on raising their children and pursuing philanthropic work, marking the beginning of her transformation from technology executive to global advocate for women and children.

From 2000 to 2024, she and Gates co-chaired the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable organization. For their philanthropic endeavors, which focused on global health, development, and education, they received numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honour. Under her leadership, the foundation became instrumental in addressing global poverty, disease, and inequity.

French Gates’s philanthropy has consistently emphasized gender equity and women’s empowerment. She led the London Summit on Family Planning in 2012 to give over 120 million women in developing countries access to contraceptives by 2020. This focus on reproductive health and women’s rights became a defining characteristic of her philanthropic approach, even as it sometimes created tension with her Catholic background.

In 2015, French Gates founded Pivotal, an organization she formed in 2015 that works to accelerate the pace of progress and advance women’s power and influence in the U.S. and around the world. In 2019, she outlined a visionary strategy to position more women in the United States to make decisions, control resources, and shape policies and perspectives. That same year, through Pivotal Ventures, French Gates committed $1 billion over 10 years to expand women’s power and influence in the United States.

After French Gates resigned as co-chair in May 2024, Bill Gates became sole chair of the renamed Gates Foundation. As part of her divorce settlement, French Gates received $12.5 billion for independent philanthropy, which she has stated will focus on women and families. In May 2024, she announced her departure from the foundation and the beginning of a new chapter in her philanthropy that underscores the text’s thematic engagement with Reframing Chane as Growth Opportunity. As a first step, she announced $1 billion in new spending through 2026 to advance women’s power around the world.

She has become a prominent megadonor to the Democratic Party, with a focus on abortion rights, and endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 US presidential election. This political engagement represents an evolution in her public advocacy, moving beyond traditional philanthropy to direct political involvement in causes aligned with her values.

The Next Day fits within French Gates’s broader body of work as both a culmination of her personal growth and a bridge between her advocacy-focused writing and more introspective literary exploration. The book’s themes of transition and personal evolution mirror her own journey from technology executive to philanthropist to independent advocate, demonstrating how personal transformation can inform and enhance public service. French Gates will be donating her proceeds from The Next Day to charitable causes.