Melinda French Gates Is Fighting to Close the Menopause Funding Gap

Melinda French Gates (0:00)

Women in our country are under tremendous stress. The health care system, it is really failing certain parts of our population. Let's demand that our health system is built for us and not somebody else.

Mary Claire Haver (0:14)

It took me 20 years of practice to sit back and realize women are not crazy. They're actually hurting.

Melinda French Gates (0:20)

We should expect our National Health Institutes to put far more funding into women's health.

Mary Claire Haver (0:26)

Billions and billions and billions.

Melinda French Gates (0:28)

Yes, our health care should not be determined by politics. It should be determined by science. I want women to step into their full power because when they do, we do change the world.

Mary Claire Haver (0:50)

The views and opinions expressed on unPAUSED are those of the talent and interests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

My guest today, Melinda French Gates, opened a recent essay in the New York Times with an image I cannot shake. A hundred years ago, American women gave birth under twilight sleep, drugged unconscious, tied to the bed if they thrashed. No voice in the room, no memory of their own child being born. We shudder at that now, at the idea that women had no agency over their bodies at this incredibly important moment of their lives. In her essay, Melinda asks a question I want us all to sit with. Will our granddaughters one day look back on how we treat menopause right now and feel exactly the same way? Nearly one in three women over the age of 40 has menopause symptoms that are severe enough to disrupt her life. Only about one in four actually gets treated. The rate of women on hormone therapy, the most effective tool we have, has collapsed to under 5%.

Fewer than a third of OBGYN training programs teach about menopause at all. And on top of that, McKinsey found that for every dollar the world spends on medical research, only five cents goes to women's health. In her essay, Melinda announced that she is giving $215 million in new funding, including a major grant to train the clinicians who keep missing the menopause symptoms in their patients. That brings her total investment in women's health to more than $600 million in two years, with menopause and midlife a priority for the first time. I applaud every dollar of it, but I didn't ask her here today to walk through a press release. I want to go deeper. Why is this happening at all?

How can we meaningfully affect change at a policy level, as well as in the patient-clinician relationship? Can more training fix a system that was never built for women's bodies in the first place? Philanthropist Melinda French Gates has spent more than two decades fighting for women and girls. Today, she leads her own organization, Pivotal, and she is aiming her resources at women's health areas that are notoriously underfunded, including initiatives aimed at menopause and midlife care for women. I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner. I'm also an adjunct professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Welcome to unPAUSED, the podcast where we cut through the silence and talk about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life.

Melinda French Gates, welcome to unPAUSED.

Melinda French Gates (3:46)

Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here.

Mary Claire Haver (3:48)

So you wrote an essay, the New York Times published, called Women Deserve Better Than This, and you called for a menopause revolution. The day that dropped, I didn't know it was coming.

My menopausal group chat exploded, you know, and every, it was just, we have about 50, 60 researchers, PhDs, MDs, DOs together. And we talk about everything that's popping up on social media and the news. So you were the topic of conversation. The same day, my Google Alerts went off because it was being picked up across multiple outlets. And my favorite podcast, All of a sudden, your Facebook was popping up everywhere. So I thought, this is big.

It spurred so much positive conversation, so much advocacy, so many people who were so excited that you had jumped into this discussion. You have focused on women's health for over 20 years. When I started digging around in the research, what's made you drawn to this especially? I know you're a mother of two daughters.

Melinda French Gates (4:49)

A mother, two daughters and a son. And my team and I for a long time have focused on women's health because only if a woman's healthy, can she step into her full power. Right? And I know that when women step into their full power, it changes their family, their community, their society. We have good research on this. So we had been focusing on the earlier stages of women's health over the last 20 years.