Philanthropist and women’s rights advocate Melinda French Gates discussed her career, public policy in the United States and navigating periods of personal change and growth at Lisner Auditorium Thursday.

Gates discussed her 2025 book “The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward,” about navigating times of personal change and grief, her decision to leave the Gates Foundation and the future of her philanthropic work. Gates conversed with journalist Michele Norris, a Washington Post opinion columnist from 2019 to 2024 and co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” from 2002 to 2011, at the event co-sponsored by the University and local bookstore Politics & Prose.

University President Ellen Granberg gave introductory remarks and said, like Gates’ philanthropic work, the University is working across disciplines and borders to “improve health outcomes worldwide,” through vaccine development, health policy and humanitarian response.

“I am especially grateful for her vision to support public health around the world, a commitment that we at GW share with her,” Granberg said.

Gates’ book discusses stories and lessons from her personal life about periods of transition, including becoming a parent, her departure from the Gates Foundation, the death of a close friend due to cancer and her divorce from her ex-husband Bill Gates. Gates said the book provides advice to readers about how to help friends navigate times of personal crisis, to embrace uncertainty and become comfortable with being imperfect.

Gates said she came up with the concept for her book when she was preparing to give the 2024 commencement address at Stanford University, where her daughter was graduating. She said when speaking to Stanford’s senior class presidents, they told her they wanted a commencement speaker who could talk about embracing life’s unexpected opportunities rather than following a strict path.

“If you can leave space in an opening, what I call a clearing, when you wake up that next day, maybe after you graduate college, that’s where the work begins,” Gates said. “That’s where the growth and the learning and the resilience happens.”

Gates said she left the Gates Foundation in 2024, one of the world’s richest charitable organizations, which she co-founded with her ex-husband Bill Gates, because she wanted to spend more time advocating for women’s equality and reproductive freedom after she was “outraged” over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. She said she stepped down from the foundation because she could not pursue those issues as much as she wanted to at the foundation.

“To think I now have these two beautiful little granddaughters, they have fewer rights than I have, that just makes no sense to me,” Gates said. “So I thought to be able to work flexibly, to be able to work on the issues I really care about in the United States, the right thing to do was just, it was time, it was time for me to step away.”

Gates said to have a country that functions effectively, women need to be in “all places” where there are positions of power. She said while men do not always make “bad policy,” they often lack female perspectives.

“I believe that our democracy, our leadership, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in politics, whether it’s in artificial intelligence, whether it’s in telling our stories, it ought to look like society,” Gates said.

Gates said her current philanthropic organization she initially formed in 2015, Pivotal Ventures, focuses on helping women in the United States and globally realize their “full power” by promoting policies beneficial to women with private funds.

Gates created a $1 billion grant fund through Pivotal in 2024, which she said will go to people “on the ground” who can discover and fund organizations and causes that help women she normally would not know about.

“I want Pivotal to be this engine and this force multiplier for lifting up people in society,” Gates said.

She said philanthropy can use private money to push for policy changes in business and government, especially for causes that typically don’t receive public funding or support.

“We have these potholes in society, so philanthropy goes in and looks for these potholes, and we can be a catalytic wedge,” Gates said. “We can try things with private money that we wouldn’t want our taxpayer money to be used on. But when those things work, you get the government to scale them up.”

Gates said Pivotal is currently working — through lobbying and advertising campaigns — to get policies passed in the United States that benefit women and families, like paid family leave, which allows new parents to take time off to raise their children. She said only 13 states and Washington, D.C. have adopted laws granting employment-protected leave for new parents, leaving a large number of families without protection.

“It is just shocking and unbelievable that we are the highest-income country in the world, and we do not have paid family leave,” Gates said to a loud cheer from the audience.

Gates said although the country is experiencing high political polarization, there are still people working to find common ground and “reach across the aisle” on policy issues. She said working with people with differing political views is the “only way” to pass effective policy.

“We have forgotten that you have to go hold your ground on really key issues, but you are going to have to give up a little something, like you are going to have to compromise,” Gates said. “People don’t seem to like that word particularly so much anymore.”

Gates said she hopes readers of her book can use her personal stories and excerpts of other authors’ wisdom in the book to overcome challenging moments and transitions in their own lives. She said she grew up in a “protected” environment with her family and got “10,000 paper cuts” when she left home, which made her a stronger person.

“I lost parts of myself along the way,” Gates said. “But if you remember who you are, if you take time and quiet, and you cultivate your friends, and you reach for timeless wisdom, you are this ever-changing, beautiful person. It all adds up to something in the end.”