It was April 2019 and Melinda French Gates was touring to promote her book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, when she opened a window into her marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

The hardest things to write about, she confided to an interviewer from CNBC, were “moments in our marriage where I was asking Bill for more equality”. Her story, she said, was “also the story of millions of women”.

A few months later, Melinda would do something unhappily familiar to many millions of women: she consulted a divorce lawyer. Then this May the Gateses announced, via Twitter, that they were ending their 27-year union. They were doing so, they explained, “because we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in the next phase of our lives”.