Melinda Gates Melinda Gates is the wife of the richest man in the world, which makes her one of the most powerful women in the worldaccording to the Forbes business magazine (ranked 12th in 2006).Along with her husband she founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and continues to spend much of her time working in the organization. She was born in Dallas Texas in 1964 as Melinda Ann French. Melinda received her bachelors degree in economics and computer science at the Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She then went on to receive an MBA (Master of Business Administration) from the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987.

In the same year she also started working at Microsoft where she would meet her future husband. Melinda worked her way into the position of General Manager of Information Products. Bill and Melinda also met that year and were married on the 1st of January, 1994.

The couple started the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 with $106 million. It has now grown to become one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. Melinda is very active in the foundation as a co-chairperson with her husband. Melinda’s responsibilities at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation involves working on strategies to pursue, promoting the issues that they seek to solve, and reviewing the results that they achieve. Bill Gates still works with Microsoft, but plans to leave the software company soon to devote all of his time to the foundation.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to improve health condition worldwide, eliminate poverty in some of the world’s poorest regions, to promote education, and to provide technology to libraries. In 2005 Time magazine chose Bill and Melinda Gates (along with U2’s Bono) as Person of the Year. The magazine celebrated the charitable works that the trio were giving to the world. Bill and Melinda Gates have three children together; Jennifer Katharine Gates born in 1996, Rory John Gates born in 1999, and Phoebe Adele Gates born in 2002.