Giving Compass' Take:

• Leslie Albrecht covers Melinda Gates' recent $1 billion pledge for women and girls advancement in the U.S., an area often under-funded. 

• How can you focus your efforts on these under-funded areas of need?

• Read more about measuring giving to women's and girls' causes.

Melinda Gates’s $1 billion pledge to advance women and girls is attention-grabbing because of its size, but it’s also unusual for another reason.

In the world of charitable giving, devoting money to women’s and girls’ causes is a rarity.

Women’s and girls’ groups received just 1.6% of charitable dollars in 2016, the most recent year for which data was available, according to a new report by the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

While there’s been a national debate on gender equity in recent years, that reckoning doesn’t appear to have had much of an effect on charitable donations, the researchers noted.

Gates’s $1 billion initiative will focus on three strategies: removing obstacles to women’s professional advancement; advancing women in fields that have a significant influence on society, including technology, media and politics; and ramping up pressure that employees, consumers and shareholders put on companies and other institutions “in need of reform,” she wrote in a first-person piece for Time magazine.

Melinda Gates’s $1 billion pledge will be distributed through Pivotal Ventures, an investment and “incubation” company she founded in 2015. (The business world has similar gender disparities to philanthropy: 2.2% of venture capital investment went to firms founded solely by women in 2017, according to PitchBook.)

Melinda Gates will give out the money as a combination of philanthropic grants and investments, a spokeswoman said.

Read the full article about Melinda Gates $1 billion pledge for women and girls by Leslie Albrecht at MarketWatch.