Anderson is president of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company founded by Melinda French Gates to advance social progress. She has served as a U.S. ambassador at the United Nations.
Before I became the president of Pivotal Ventures, I spent most of my career in national security. In my roles at the United Nations, the White House and the State Department, I had the chance to work on big, audacious challenges with teams I deeply respected and admired. But as much as I valued my colleagues, I was also conscious of who was missing from the rooms where decisions were made. It was not unusual over my long career to find myself the only woman in the room — or one of only a few.
Unfortunately, women’s underrepresentation in those rooms probably made us less effective. Research makes clear that peace agreements are longer-lasting and more durable when women help make them.
We are missing opportunities across many other aspects of American life, too. Women hold less than one-third of the jobs in the technical workforce, about one-third of elected offices, and approximately one-sixth of check-writing positions in venture capital — and in every case, women of color are even more underrepresented than white women.
In other words, the power centers that will do the most to determine the future are mired in the past. If women were proportionately represented in these areas, our technology would be more innovative, our politics would engage a whole new range of issues, and our companies would serve the needs of many more customers.
That’s why, at Pivotal, we see expanding women’s power and influence not as a single issue but rather as a prerequisite to progress on more or less every issue. We believe dismantling barriers to equality for women of all backgrounds will spark widespread social progress. And if equal representation benefits everyone, then it means that there are a lot of potential allies for our work, including people who don’t currently think of themselves as advocates for women.
Last summer, at the Summit on Resilient and Enduring Democracy, our team joined other donors who care deeply about protecting our political system in these polarizing times. Ultimately, we can't have a thriving, healthy, active democracy if we don't have equal representation. And, if we don't have a democracy that is fair, transparent, and welcoming, it's going to be harder and harder for women to participate fully. Women need the democracy movement, and the democracy movement needs women. We’re now convening regularly with the Democracy Funders Network to support a broad-based movement built on shared priorities such as combating dis- and misinformation and protecting the safety of candidates, election workers, and officeholders.
Similarly, partners in our caregiving portfolio are helping to roll out the historic provision in the 2023 federal CHIPS and Science Act that requires employers who receive funding under the act to provide child care to their workers. Plenty of people who don’t think of themselves as champions for women’s rights endorse child care for other reasons — for instance, because they want to promote economic growth. Indeed, equality and economic growth go hand in hand, and when advocates for both priorities work together to implement an important policy, that’s success.
Finally, we recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of Reboot Representation, a coalition of tech companies created in 2018 to double the number of Black, Latina, and Native American women receiving computing degrees by 2025. These companies are in the business of developing and selling technologies, not promoting social justice, but they know that more-diverse engineering talent is better for their long-term prospects. Reboot includes Google and Microsoft, Dell and HP — a lot of companies that compete against each other — so our value-add, besides modest operational funding, was to provide a neutral venue to help them come together. Now they’re sharing data, discovering best practices, and investing millions of dollars in programming. Reboot’s goal is on track, and the tech industry is a few steps closer to reflecting the people who use its products and services.
I’m not exactly breaking new ground by calling for holistic thinking and creative collaborations, but as social-change grant makers and nonprofits, we’re working against perverse incentives, resource scarcity, zero-sum thinking, and other traps that make it hard to build partnerships. These examples help me imagine what’s possible if more of us resolved to share ideas, forge stronger links, and merge agendas.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was onto something when she said, “Women belong in all the places where decisions are being made.” They belong there, and we need them there. Whether it’s national security, technology, politics, finance ... you name it, decisions made in rooms that matter are smarter and better when women help make them.
This article was originally published in The Commons.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.