French Gates’s ex-husband, Bill Gates, sat down with the president after he won the Oval Office and spoke with Trump about his philanthropic efforts.
But a wider shift to the right among the tech community has also been observed by people like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who said dinner parties in Silicon Valley are now split across the political spectrum, where previously most leaned left.
“A democracy is made up by our beliefs and our investments and our values. We, of all times right now, should be living those values out, not pivoting to what some comms person tells us is the right thing to do. That would be ridiculous.”
Like her former husband and co-founder at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, French Gates was also critical of the supreme power awarded to Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a special government employee.
Shifts towards a more right-wing mentality have also been observed across corporate America as DEI initiatives have been scaled back.
Here, French Gates said, history will not be kind to the companies that undid some of their policies to promote diversity, equality, and inclusion.
“You have to look at society,” the philanthropist said. “Who’s in our society right now and does our democracy, do our state legislatures and does our Senate or our Congress look like society? The answer is no.
“The reason you need to have of all society representative in the legislature in any governing body is because they make good policy based on their lived experience.”
Data supports French Gates’s opinion. While the 119th Congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse group in history, it remains far less diverse than the American population as a whole.
However, this figure is still a long way off the social makeup of the voters they represent.
Pew found that non-Hispanic White people make up a larger share of Congress (74%) than the overall population (58%), indeed the gap is about as wide as it was more than forty years ago in 1981, when 94% of congressional lawmakers were White, compared with 80% of the U.S. population.
