Women philanthropists are coming together to fund the fight for gender equality—and reshape the entire giving ecosystem.
This summer, Melinda French Gates made headlines for investing in women: She pledged $215 million toward contraceptive access, maternal care and menopause research, bringing the total amount she has donated toward women’s health to more than $600 million in just two years.
This isn’t new terrain for French Gates: In 2019, she pledged to give $1 billion over the course of a decade to advance gender equality; in 2024, she announced a second $1 billion commitment to fund a spread of gender-based initiatives.
Perhaps the only single donor matching French Gates’ commitment in the feminist space is MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Scott has donated, according to a cursory search of her own records, at least $1.2 billion to organizations focused on women and girls. In 2021, Scott and French Gates, with the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, joined forces to give $40 million to organizations advancing gender equality.
These investments in the feminist future are notable not just for their size, but for their rarity in the philanthropic landscape. According to an analysis by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University, giving to women’s and girls’ organizations in the U.S. peaked in 2022—at just 2.18 percent of all charitable contributions.
In 2019, French Gates shared two motivations for her initial $1 billion pledge: to address how “chronically underfunded” gender equality efforts are in this country, and to inspire further giving to women and girls.
“I hope the financial commitment I’m making today is seen as … an invitation for others to join the cause and make commitments of their own,” French Gate wrote. “Equality can’t wait, and no one in a position to act should either.”
By investing in women and girls, everyone will thrive.
Sarah Haacke Byrd
Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions (WMM), shares that hope.
“It’s [an] additive and powerful, inspirational example of what could be done,” she says to Ms. “Anything at any size is possible if you can understand the connection between your resources and your power.”
Gwyn Lurie, cofounder and CEO of The Giving List Women (GLW), said, “Whether it’s MacKenzie Scott or Melinda [French] Gates or Laurene [Powell] Jobs or Mellody Hobson … it’s really important that that doesn’t excuse any of us from giving what we can. They can’t do it alone, nor should they.”
Instead, through groups like WMM and GLW, feminists in philanthropy are doing it together—and ushering in an era of transformative change for women and girls.
Building the Infrastructure
“We know the research: You invest in women, they invest in their families and communities,” Byrd says. “By investing in women and girls, everyone will thrive.”
WMM has built a community around growing that investment through collective financial power.
In 2007, WMM began with a campaign uniting women philanthropists that raised $181 million for 41 women’s funds. Nearly 20 years later, its 400 members have collectively committed more than $1 billion to women and girls—and they’re already halfway to their 2030 goal to move $1 billion more.
Byrd came to WMM after 25 years in the nonprofit sector, which opened her eyes to the underfunding of women’s rights organizations. “I think of our work as being deeply in service of the movements that we’re trying to advance,” Byrd says, noting that she wants WMM “to strengthen the funding ecosystem of the movement for gender equality, and … serve as a really effective bridge to the intersecting movements focused on women’s rights and gender equity.” She sees the community WMM is building as “essential infrastructure” in that work.
WMM members each pledge to direct at least $1 million over the course of a decade to initiatives or organizations that benefit women and girls, including 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations and women-led businesses, “whose business purpose is to benefit women and/or girls.” Members onboard through WMM’s Philanthropic Leadership Program, a retreat that connects the dots between investment and impact, and they continue to learn from leaders in philanthropy and advocacy at nearly 100 in-person and virtual events each year, including biannual summits.
“Helping individuals understand how to realize their vision for the impact that they want to see in the world is such a powerful part of what we do,” Byrd says.
It’s also at the core of the multiplier effect WMM has been able to create through its community.
More than 80 percent of WMM members have collaborated around their philanthropy through affinity groups focused on specific issues such as women’s health or gender-based violence, by supporting one another’s charitable ventures and partnering on projects, and by coming together to fuel WMM’s own initiatives and catalyst funds.
WMM’s Women’s Power & Influence Catalyst Fund—launched in 2022 with a $5 million gift from French Gates—ultimately funneled $11 million to 23 organizations. And just this summer, WMM launched its Art Catalyst Matching Fund, which is poised to invest $20 million in the U.S. in an “initiative at the intersection of art, gender equality and democracy.” (Ms.’ own Feminist 250 project was supported in part by that fund.)
“The more complex the environment has gotten,” Byrd says, “the more our members have turned inward, into community, to support them in understanding how to navigate that complexity with the confidence and purpose that they’re seeking.”
The result is explosive growth in activity and impact. Over the past two years, WMM members increased their median giving by 50 percent, hitting $450,000 in 2025, and their total collective giving power grew by $41 million. Altogether, they moved $214 million toward gender equality, with 70 percent of members giving. This helped to close critical funding gaps at organizations they support, and increased numbers of donations in the form of unrestricted gifts and multiyear support models.
“Our members were ready for this moment,” Byrd says, due in large part to the resources WMM offers them to roll up their sleeves and put their money to work in the world. “At a time when most of philanthropy had to pause, reset, reevaluate, our community moved forward and they gave more. And that’s intentional.”
Rewriting the Narrative
“Part of giving is having skin in the game and taking responsibility for what this world looks like,” Lurie of GLW says.
GLW encourages philanthropists to take responsibility, too, for how their investments shape our collective story. After working as a reporter, film and media executive and screenwriter, Lurie became the CEO and executive editor of the Montecito Journal Media Group, where she oversaw a number of philanthropy publications. Those grew into The Giving List—glossy books (along with a digital platform) featuring local nonprofits in Santa Barbara, Calif., that were sent to tens of thousands of donors and have sometimes brought in six-figure donations for featured organizations. (Los Angeles and Northern California’s Bay Area now have their own Giving Lists; San Diego is coming next.)
Then, at the end of 2021, Lurie’s cofounder, Tim Buckley, got a call from Stacey Keare, now the board chair for WMM. When Buckley connected the two women, Keare asked Lurie a pivotal question: “Would you ever consider doing a Giving List Women?”
In response, Lurie embarked on a yearlong journey across the U.S. to meet with nonprofit leaders and philanthropists.
“What I learned very quickly is how little money goes to women and girls,” she recalls.
A common refrain she says she heard from donors explains why: “‘Women and girls aren’t really our lane. Our lane is the environment, or our lane is social justice, or our lane is education.’ At a certain point, I just blurted out, ‘Women and girls are not a lane. They’re a lens.’”
GLW is one way Lurie intends to change the narrative. Each volume spotlights more than 50 nonprofit organizations that apply a gender lens to their work, across issues and around the globe. Feature stories extolling the groups’ impact are published alongside interviews with game-changing philanthropists and advocates. More than 400,000 people have received the books, and the ideas in its pages come to life each year through a series of dinners with organizational leaders and GLW Summit.
Lurie sees the book and the GLW events as on-ramps for philanthropists who want their money to make a difference.
“Nonprofits aren’t necessarily great at telling their own stories,” she says. “And at the same time, donors don’t necessarily have the time or way to do real due diligence.”
Women and girls are not a lane. They’re a lens.
Gwyn Lurie
GLW seeks to solve both sides of the conundrum: Since 2024, the organization has made more than 4,000 introductions in the philanthropic space and has helped marshal $72 million in cash and in-kind contributions for organizations supporting women and girls.
According to a survey of GLW Summit attendees, 96 percent left with a new or renewed focus on applying a gender lens to their giving, including 100 percent of donors who previously hadn’t centered women and girls in their philanthropy. Attendees increased the share of their giving directed to women and girls from 22.7 to 42.3 percent, and nearly half of donors who hadn’t previously funded organizations dedicated to women and girls now do so, on average, with 32 percent of their gifts.
After the first GLW Summit, the Zegar Family Foundation announced grants to the Global Justice Center and Equality Now, and global law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher launched its Justice for Women and Girls Initiative, which has since provided 56,000 pro bono hours on behalf of women and girls, valued at $71 million.
“There [is] interesting, innovative work being done around the world,” Lurie says. “If we don’t know about it, if we don’t share those stories, if we don’t partner with each other … then we’re always reinventing the wheel. We’re not taking advantage of the human spirit and capacity for change and growth and hope.”
The Now + the Next
This is a pivotal moment for philanthropy focused on women and girls, not only because our rights are actively under attack in the U.S. and globally, but because we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented opportunity to shape the future.
More than $100 trillion in assets will be passed down over the next two decades from baby boomers and the Silent Generation, including nearly $40 trillion to female spouses and $47 trillion to women in younger generations. By as soon as 2030, around two-thirds of private wealth in the U.S. will be held by women.
As CNBC reports, it will be what experts call the “great wealth transfer” will be “the largest wealth transfer by gender in history.”
The transfer is “one of the most significant opportunities in modern history to reshape the future of philanthropy and accelerate progress for women and girls,” according to WMM.
In anticipation of this shift, Byrd shares that WMM is “thinking internally about what new philanthropists who are going to inherit will need from an education perspective: tools and resources that might look really different generationally or depending on where the money came from. We have a lot of women who are going to be coming into resources through AI and crypto and all these other new windfalls that are around the corner. We’re thinking about the full ecosystem.”
GLW, too, is eager to continue challenging donors new and old to rethink philanthropy as the face of giving changes.
“It’s more important than ever to create these on-ramps, to bring people into this way of thinking about giving,” Lurie says. “It’s really important that young people are thinking about philanthropy and that philanthropy is redefined … that everybody thinks of themselves in a way as a leader and shows up and gives what they can—whether it’s time, treasure, talent [or] ties.”
WMM and GLW aren’t competitors in this fast-evolving giving landscape. Instead, they are collaborators, two organizations with overlapping communities working to create what Lurie calls “containers for collectivity.”
Perhaps that, in and of itself, is indicative of the future that organizations like theirs hope to seed: one in which there is room for all of our voices at the tables where decisions are made, where all of our stories are told to those who need to hear them and where each and every woman and girl has a community of champions behind her.
This article also appears in the Fall 2026 issue of Ms. magazine. Become a Ms. member today and get print issues delivered right to your mailbox.
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