The billionaire philanthropist looks forward to a day when economies around the world are transformed by women unburdened by the necessities of free labor.
By Maggie McGrath, Forbes Staff
The way Melinda French Gates looks at it, the state of female power in 2023 was a matter of sliding doors. “If you slide one door, and you look through it, you can see a lot of progress for women,” says the billionaire philanthropist, citing victories in the continuing battle for reproductive choice and Nobel Prizes awarded to women. “And then if you slide another door, you say, ‘Wow, there’s still so many difficulties for women.’”
Among the most pressing is the lack of childcare help. So many women in the U.S. and around the world have such little structural support in caring for their families that they’re often forced to devote their time and money to work that doesn’t pay at the expense of work that does.
“We still expect women to do the unpaid labor that our societies are built on the backs of, and our economies are built on the backs of,” French Gates, No. 10 on this year’s list of the World’s Most Powerful Women, told Forbes in an exclusive conversation. “We have got to solve the caregiving-problems crisis around the world.”
That problem-solving needs to start at home, and it needs to start fast. At the end of September, $24 billion of federal childcare funding that had been a part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act pandemic-relief package expired — the so-called childcare cliff. It leaves 70,000 childcare facilities in the U.S. at risk of closing. More than three million children could lose their spots in daycare and the parents who cut back on their working hours or leave the workforce to fill the gap stand to lose a collective $9 billion in earnings, according to research from the Century Foundation.
While French Gates’ goal is to spread women’s economic self-determination, it’s also true that entire societies are transformed by female participation. And entire economies can suffer when women are forced to leave. The loss in tax and business revenue from the childcare cliff will likely cost states $10.6 billion in annual economic activity, the Century Foundation says.
This year, the U.S. saw its highest female labor-force participation rate since before the pandemic. The number of women between the ages of 25 and 54 who are employed set a record that goes back to 1948, when comprehensive state data were first collected, according to a Wells Fargo analysis. But KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk warns that these gains could be reversed.
“A year from now, Covid-era subsidies for low-income childcare are going to expire, as well,” Swonk told Forbes. “And all those things are going to erode the ability of some women to participate [in the economy] at the same time that they have less say over when and how and if they have children. That’s a very hard reality.”
Time Poverty
French Gates, who’s worth $10.3 billion according to Forbes, has been focused on ridding the world of “time poverty” — the result of unpaid care work — since she first raised the issue in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter in 2016. This year, the foundation invested $70 million in organizations working to promote female economic empowerment, a broad category that includes nonprofits building solutions to the caregiving crisis.
One of those nonprofits is Kidogo, a childcare network and incubator in Kenya. Founded by Sabrina Natasha Habib and her partner in 2014, Kidogo takes existing mom-and-pop daycares around Kenya — many of which are run by women who have little more than a primary school education and serve lower-income families — and puts them through a three-month “quality improvement program.” The program teaches the daycare operators about proper child nutrition and education and courses on business budgeting and cash-flow management. The daycares that pass Kidogo’s standards become official franchisees and get access to ongoing mentoring, space renovation and support from Habib and her staff.
Kidogo cofounder Sabrina Habib with French Gates.
Sabrina HabibThe result, Habib says, is not just a network of daycare centers that has become Kenya’s largest — some 1,500 facilities that serve 37,000 children — but a churning flywheel putting more money in the hands of women.
“We have women who were often told that they weren't good enough to become real teachers; they’ve got no more than a primary school education,” Habib says. “They’re now earning between 50 to 200% more in revenue within one year of joining Kidogo as a result of better tracking of their finances. And because their quality is so good, they get more and more kids to sign up.”
Boosting Female Leaders
Habib received the first part of the Gates grant money last month; the $860,000 in total funding will last for three years. Its primary use will be to quantify the precise effect childcare has on mothers’ wages, work attendance and stress levels. Habib says the research is only just beginning, but the results stand to be significant. Economists and social scientists already know the sheer hours women are spending on unpaid labor — 12.5 billion a day, which translates to at least $10 trillion in lost contributions to the global GDP.
The world is also losing untold numbers of future leaders. Consider Makiko Ono, No. 86 on the Forbes Power Women list. In March, Ono became the CEO of Suntory Food and Beverage, the first woman in the role and a rare woman in leadership in Japan, where just 1% of the Tokyo Stock Exchange has female leadership. Ono is single and has, in the past, told press that her career may not have progressed so significantly had she been married with children.
But women shouldn’t have to choose between having a family and having a career. “We forget, in this country, that what allowed women to go to university and stay in and get fully educated, what allowed women to go into the workforce, was the birth-control pill,” French Gates says. “Contraceptives are an enormous factor in terms of women’s ability to earn money, get a great education, and then have decision-making authority.”
In other words, it’s all part of one virtuous cycle: The more policies that support women’s ability to have a career, the more women can rise to leadership ranks in world governments and write policies that can support the lives, families and work of their female constituents, the more likely it is that entire economies will prosper. But currently, that cycle is stymied.
“We need lots of female prime ministers and presidents; we need lots of women in the majorities and heads of Parliaments and Congress,” French Gates says. “Because then you’re creating policy changes that do have ripple effects — not just in one country, but around the world.”
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