A Summary of The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates
Melinda Gates is by far one of the most wealthy and powerful women in the world, and I didn’t even know what she looked like until a few months ago.
This was in part because she did not want to be in the spotlight.
She wanted to raise her 3 kids with her rich, successful and the highly publicized Bill Gates.
I learned a lot from her book, and find it to be alarming, inspiring and practical all at the same time.
The Moment of Lift – Why this title?
Melinda Gates chooses the title because it represents the awe inspiring and curious moment when great things happen, like a space shuttle launching or a plane taking off or spiritual enlightenment.
Her book is inspired by her travels, and her realization that the best way to lift humanity is to lift women.
She wants to create a moment of lift in human hearts so that we all want to lift up women.
I love her quote “Because sometimes all that’s needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down.” (p.3)
Sharing Stories of Women Being Lifted Up
Melinda Gates wants to share stories of women being lifted up, and she starts with her own.
The Lift of a Great Idea – Story of Melinda Gates
Melinda grew up learning about computers when they were just being developed.
She was lucky to have a math teacher Mrs. Bauer at her all girl’s school buy 5 Apple II+ computers and learn how to use them so that she could teach the 600 girls in her school.
Melinda then went on to study computers in college and get an MBA, then a job at Microsoft.
Melinda did well at Microsoft, also married Bill Gates, and then quit her job to raise their kids.
She did what she wanted, had a career, then raised her kids, then went back to a career.
She also realized that she could do this with contraception.
The beginning of her realization that her access to contraception (and that she lived in a rich country), allowed her to have her dream, made her become an advocate to contraception for all women.
As a Catholic, she had a hard time rising up to be a proponent for making contraception available to women, but she decided saving lives was in alignment with her faith, and hence this book and her movement as a spokesperson for women’s rights.
Empowering Mothers Maternal and Newborn Health
Hans Rosling was a doctor and Professor of International Health, and was a mentor to Melinda Gates since 2007.
He shared this story with Melinda on what extreme poverty and living in the margins really means.
When he was a young doctor in Mozambique in the early 1980’s, there was a cholera epidemic and he and his small staff would go out to find people with cholera.
One day they drove into a remote village with 50 mud block houses, and the villagers looked into his car and they called out his nickname “Doctor Tall”.
He asked how they knew him and they told him that he had treated one woman from their village at his hospital.
After questioning he found out that she had arrived with a difficult childbirth. The baby was already dead. He tried to remove it by cutting it into pieces and her uterus ruptured and she died.
This is why he was so well known and respected by them.
“You went out of the room into your yard. You stopped the vaccination car from leaving.
You ran to catch up with it, you made the car come back, you took out boxes from the car, and you arranged for the woman from our village to be wrapped in a white sheet.
You provided the sheet, and you even provided a small sheet for the pieces of the baby.
Then you arranged for the woman’s body to be put into that jeep, and you made one of your staff get out so there would be room for the brothers to go with her.
So after that tragedy, she was back home the same day while the sun was still shining. We had the funeral that evening, and her whole family, everyone was here.
We never expected anyone to show such respect for us poor farmers here in the forest.” (p.36)
Unfortunately, it is the case that extreme poverty will make it very dangerous for women to give birth. The mortality rate for mothers and babies is much higher in poor communities than in rich ones.
Poverty is not being able to protect your family.
Help mothers protect their children and you create richer communities.
Ruchi Saves A Baby With Skin to Skin Contact
She shares a story of a high caste community health worker in India, who saved a day old baby’s life.
She arrived to find the mother had fainted and the baby was turning blue and dropping in temperature.
The family wouldn’t touch the baby because they thought it had an evil spirit.
So, even though it was taboo for her of high caste to touch a baby of low caste, she took the baby and put it in her sari, against her skin.
It warmed up and lived.
Her story spread from village to village and started the the process of skin to skin contact for newborns.
The myth of the evil spirit in the dying babies was the barrier, and once broken, the message and method of skin to skin care of babies was accepted and spread…saving babies’ lives.
“Delivery systems matter…Getting tools to people who need them in ways that encourage people to use them – that is a delivery system.” (p.42)
“The challenge of delivery reveals the causes of poverty. You learn why people are poor. You don’t have to guess what the barriers are. As soon as you try to deliver help, you run into them.” (p.49)
Every Good Thing – Family Planning
Here’s the story that revealed to Melinda the truth of the need for family planning (contraception) for all women.
“In the afternoon, I was able to visit the home of a mother named Meena who had delivered a baby boy just two weeks before…
I asked her, “Do you want to have more children?”…
“The truth is no, I don’t want to have any more kids. We’re very poor. My husband works hard, but we’re just extremely poor. I don’t know how I’m going to feed this child. I have no hopes for educating him. In fact, I have no hopes for this child’s future at all….The only hope I have for this child’s future, is if you’ll take him home with you. Please take him too.” (pp. 55-56)
Melinda found out that women will walk miles, sometimes take off an entire day, just to visit a clinic to get a contraception shot that will last 6 months.
However, often times the clinics will not have the shot.
They will offer them condoms instead, which the women cannot use. If they ask their husbands to use condoms, they will be beaten up. “It’s like I’m accusing him of being unfaithful and got HIV”. (p.58)
When she spoke to Adissa, a 42-year old woman who had been married at 14, and had given birth to 10 children, 4 of whom had died, she gave this advice – “If you can’t take care of your children, you are just training them to steal.” (p.62)
Adissa had started taking the contraceptive shot after her 10th pregnancy…even though her husband and sister-in-law look at her suspiciously and ask her why she hasn’t given birth recently. (She answers that “She’s tired.”).
Melinda then reminds us of how contraception wasn’t legal for all women in the United States until 1972 – Eisenstadt v. Baird. It was only made legal for married women in 1965 – Griswold v. Connecticut.
Before then you would get arrested!
Margaret Sanger opened the first clinic in the United States in 1916 to offer contraceptives.
She was arrested ten days later, posted bail, went back to work and was arrested again.
Her arrests made her famous, and women wrote to her (these letters were published in Motherhood in Bondage):
“I would do anything for my two children to help them go through a decent life. I am constantly living in fear of becoming pregnant again so soon. Mother gave birth to twelve children.”
“I have heart trouble and I would like to be here and raise these four than have more and maybe die.”
“I have to carry my babies to the field, and I have seen their little faces blistered by the hot sun…Husband said he intended making our girls plow, and I don’t want more children to be slaves.” (p.64)
“When social norms help everyone prosper, they have natural support because they’re in people’s self-interest. But when norms protect the power of certain groups or forbid or deny things that are a natural part of human experience, the norms can’t stand on their own; they have to be enforced by some sanction or stigma.”(p. 81)
Melinda then talks about legislation in 2018 that is being proposed to cut funding for contraception in the United States for the poor, and for at risk teenagers.
Instead it wants to promote programs that promote abstinence.
This movement if it comes to fruition is going to result in many poor women having more children just because they are poor.
Lifting Their Eyes – Girls in School
Melinda shares the story of a 10 year old girl named Sona who approached her foundation colleague Gary Darmstad and told him “I want a teacher”.
He was there to assess the progress of their family program, and not to help Sona go to school.
However, she asked him 50 times for a teacher.
He then decided to help her get one. He worked to help make the inhabitants of that community legal residents of India, which allowed them to social services such as schools.
Sona got her teacher.
In order to get out of poverty, children need an education that teaches them to excel beyond their current circumstances.
Melinda then tells of Betsy Layne High School in Floyd County, Kentucky, which is a rural community that was devastated by the decline in the coal industry.
The school had climbed from 145th to 12th in student achievement.
The principal Cassandra Akers states “Our students have to know that we expect great things”, she said. “But they also know that whatever they need, we’re going to help them get it, whether it’s teaching, tutoring, extra help, food, clothes, a bed, whatever. You have to take care of all of them.”
Melinda then talks about how less girls go to secondary and post secondary school than boys. In low-income countries, for every hundred boys who continue their education after high school, only fifty-five girls do the same.
This happens for various reasons, low income families need their labor, they can’t afford school fees, traditions might say women don’t need an education.
One young Pakistani woman Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban when she was 15 years old because she blogged about going to school under the Taliban.
She later won the Nobel Peace Prize and is an activist who envisions all girls in school in her lifetime.
She then gives more examples of programs that are getting girls in schools.
Mexico paid low income families to send their kids to school (the same they would have been paid if they stayed home and worked instead).
Fazle Hasan Abed of Bangladesh created BRAC, that builds schools to educate girls.
The schools don’t charge fees and accommodate the growing season, so that the girls can still work at home.
Even though extremists started burning the schools down, they rebuilt and now Bangladesh has more girls attending high school than boys.
“BRAC runs 48,000 schools and learning centers around the world. It goes to the most dangerous places in the world for a girl to attend school and slowly helps those cultures change.” (p.105)
Kakenya Ntaiya of Kenya made a deal with her father. She would submit to female genital cutting as long as he let her stay single so she could stay in school.
She ended up getting a full scholarship to go to College in the US, found a way to get the villagers to pay for her plane fare with a promise that she would come back.
She came back and started a girl’s school. The elders finally helped her because the boys never came back. Girls were a better investment for the community.
Finally, the story that inspired the name of the chapter was of a boarding school for girls in the poorest area in India. The girls would enter this school with their heads bowed down and their eyes looking at the ground.
After a few years, they lifted their eyes, would look others in the eyes confidently.
They learned that they had the right to study, the right to play, the right to walk around freely, the right to be safe, the right to speak up for herself.
The Silent Inequality – Unpaid Work
She begins by telling the story of Champa, a woman who had a malnourished child that needed 2 weeks of treatment in a special clinic to survive.
Champa couldn’t leave the house because her father-in-law forbade it. She had to cook, clean and do all of the housework.
When the social worker found the father-in-law lying drunk in a field, he said, “If God takes away one child, he always gives another one. God is very great and generous in this respect.”
The social worker said “This was not an exceptional case. I’ve seen it time and again. The women have no rights, no empowerment. All they do is cook and clean and let their kids die in their arms, and not even show their face.” (p,177)
Women do more unpaid work in every country in the world, including the United States…though the disparity is different depending on the country.
“In India, women spend 6 hours a day doing unpaid work, while men spend less than 1.
In the US, women average more than 4 hours of unpaid work every day; men average just 2.5.
In Norway, women spend 3.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men spend about 3.
There is no country where the gap is zero.
This means that, on average, women do seven years more of unpaid work than men over their lifetimes.” (pp. 117-118)
Unpaid work includes cooking, cleaning, childcare, caregiving, shopping and errands. In countries that don’t have electricity and running water, it includes gathering firewood and collecting water.
Melinda shared a homestay she did in Tanzania with her daughter. She and her daughter worked alongside Anna for 17 hours a day.
In addition, they had twins Grace and Penda. Penda the boy had passed his exams and could go to a government funded secondary school.
However Grace had not passed yet and the parents worried about her.
Grace did housework since she was a girl, and had less time to study than her twin brother Penda, who didn’t do housework.
Grace asked Melinda’s daughter for her headlamp, so that she could study at night after she finished her chores.
That’s the effect of unpaid work on girls.
They have less time to study, less time to do paid work, less time to empower themselves.
Marilyn Waring was the first to study and count the economic value of unpaid work. “…she calculated that if you hired workers at the market rate to do all the unpaid work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector of the global economy. And yet economist were not counting this as work.” (p.123)
She then wrote the book If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics in 1988, which got the world to pay attention to unpaid work.
Melinda speaks of her own experiences with having to make sure everyone helps out cleaning the kitchen, and how Bill volunteered to help drive their daughter to kindergarten twice a week.
Discovering Hidden Bias
Melinda talks about gender exercises in communities in Malawi where men don’t even know there is a gender bias.
After role playing what their wives do all day, they realize that their wives work a lot harder than they do.
It changes their family life. The men start helping with the chores and start asking the wife’s opinion of financial matters as well.
“MenCare, a group headed by Gary Barker, urges men around the world to take on caregiving tasks-and has persuasive data on why men should want to do that.
Men who share caregiving duties are happier.
They have better relationships.
They have happier children.
When fathers take on at least 40 percent of the childcare responsibilities, they are at lower risk of depression and drug abuse, and their kids have higher test scores, stronger self-esteem, and fewer behavior problems.
And, according to MenCare, stay-at-home dads show the same brain-hormone changes as stay-at-home moms, which suggests that the idea that mothers are biologically more suited to taking care of kids isn’t necessarily true.” (p.130)
Melinda then delves into how she became more of an equal partner with Bill, her extremely vocal and powerful husband.
She had to step up and start doing public speaking and having a public presence just like Bill, so that everyone would see that the foundation wasn’t just Bill’s but was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
She also had to push to write the Foundation’s annual letter together with Bill. They fought about it but gradually over 3 years, it finally became a letter written by both of them, and not just Bill.
Their solution according to Bill on creating an equal partnership is “We try not to have anybody be the time cop for somebody else. We certainly talk about the calendar, but we never want to have something where one of us is cast in the carefree role and the other is in this bothersome role. Better to have it as a mutual challenge.” (p.147)
She ends the chapter stating that women need to lift each other up – not to replace men at the top of the hierarchy, but to become partners with men in ending hierarchy.
When a Girl Has No Voice – Child Marriage
This was by far the most tragic chapter for me to read.
She begins the chapter telling the story of a teacher who saved one of her young girl students from being sold into prostitution by her husband.
Her family had agreed to marry her and given a dowrie, but the husband later felt it wasn’t enough.
When he asked for more money and the family did not have it, he started beating the girl and threatened to sell her into prostitution to get more money.
“Girls who are forced into marriage lose their families, their friends, their schools, and any chance for advancement.
Even at the age of 10 or 11, they are expected to take on the duties of housework – cooking, cleaning, farming, feeding the animals, fetching wood and water – and soon after that, they’re expected to take on the duties of motherhood.
The burdens of work, pregnancy, and childbirth have dire consequences for the child bride.”
Another girl named Fati was married at 13 and got pregnant right away. Her childbirth was painful and took 3 days, after which she got help at a clinic where her baby died and she found she suffered a fistula.
“An obstretric fistula typically develops during a long and obstructed labor, usually when the baby is too big or the mother too small for a smooth delivery.
The baby’s head puts pressure on the surrounding tissues, restricts blood supply, and creates a hole between the vagina and the bladder or the vagina and the rectum.
The can lead to incontinence, including stool passing through the vagina.
The husbands of girls with fistulas are frequently upset by the foul smell and the physical injury and often just kick their wives out of the family.” (p. 154)
She was in a hospital getting treatment for her fistula and hoped to go back to her husband. She had been living with her father for the last 2 years.
“For girls age 15 to 19 around the world, the leading cause of death is childbirth.” (p.156)
Girls are often tricked, told they are going to parties and later find out that they are getting married and never see their families again.
Now there are apps that girls can get on their phone to help them prevent being married as children.
In Bihar India, a 13-year-old girl used the app to send an SOS when she overheard her parents were going to marry her off the next day.
A worker rushed to the house and spoke to the parents.
Child marriage is illegal in India, but the parents were still going to marry their daughter. So they contacted the police who came and stopped the marriage the next day.
She was lucky, she didn’t get married and could continue going to school.
But how do you stop the parents from wanting to marry off their daughters? They are often doing it to keep their daughters from being raped and abused by men who aren’t their husbands, which would bring shame to both the family and the girl.
Melinda then talks about how in Senegal Molly Melching challenged long standing cultural practices to end female mutilation and child marriage.
She used empathy.
She launched a program called Tostan (means breakthrough), which had trained facilitators fluent in the local language live in communities for three years and guide a community-wide conversation.
“Villagers are asked to come up with their ideal village, their so-called Island of Tomorrow.” (p. 165)
To help them achieve their ideal future, the facilitators teach health, hygiene, reading, math, problem solving and that every person has fundamental human rights.
Eventually the facilitators talked about the health consequences of genital cutting, including infection and hemorrhaging.
Though it was met with silence on that day, the next day, a village midwife shared that the women who she cut had more difficult births.
Then other women shared their stories.
Some of their daughters died from cutting.
Some remembered how painful it was for them.
They debated for months on whether is was necessary to keep doing it at all.
Finally they decided to stop doing it.
Molly worried that the village would be isolated unless all of the other villages stopped genital cutting as well. She spoke to the imam in the village, and he went to all the neighboring villages and discussed it with them.
When he came back, they had all agreed to stop genital cutting as well.
Then it spread to even more villages and nations.
Then villagers started discussing other practices that were harmful, such as child marriage.
They decided to ban child marriage as well.
They are also sharing housework. Men are fetching the water and doing more chores. They say it makes their women happier and “our marital bed is happier.” (p.169)
Women are now becoming friends with their husbands.
Seeing Gender Bias – Women in Agriculture
Melinda talks about how most poor farmers are women.
Programs that were intended to help farmers were often ineffective because they were directed towards men, who didn’t actually do the farming.
Once social workers realized this, they asked the men to give their wives permission to attend farming classes, The men agreed because the classes would bring in more income.
Then programs to improve agriculture finally made an impact, because they were reaching the real farmers…women.
Farm yields increased and family incomes grew.
Creating a New Culture – Women in the Workplace
Melinda talks first about how it took her years to be herself and create her own style as a manager in Microsoft, a male dominated company.
When she did though, she thrived and so did the company.
She then went on to talk about how Susan Fowler spoke up about the sexual abuse she suffered at Uber…which started the #MeToo movement.
Uber’s CEO was forced to resign, and twenty other people were fired.
Women started sharing stories of sexual harassment at work, with 12 million posts on Facebook in just 24 hours.
Being sexually harassed isn’t the only issue in the workplace.
The need for more equality in tech became apparent when Joy Buolamwini, an African American computer scientist found that facial recognition software couldn’t recognize her face because she was black.
In any field, but especially tech, if you don’t have a diverse workforce developing and creating products, you will likely make products that can only service a limited portion of the population.
“A 2010 academic study on group intelligence found that the collective intelligence of a workgroup is correlated to three factors: the average social sensitivity of the group members, the group’s ability to take turns contributing, and the proportion of females in the group.
Groups that included at least one woman outperformed all-male groups in collective intelligence tests, and group intelligence was more strongly correlated to gender diversity than to the IQs of the individual team members.” (p.229)
Having women in work groups is better business.
A Workplace Compatible with Family Life
“Today in the US, we’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads – set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house.” (p.234)
“Paid family and medical leave allows people to care for their families and themselves in times of need.” (p.237)
“The lack of paid leave in the US is symptomatic of a workplace culture that also struggles with sexual harassment, gender bias, and a general indifference to family life. All these issues are aggravated by one reality: fewer women in positions of power.” (p.238)
Let Your Heart Break – The Lift of Coming Together
This last chapter talked about helping people on the margins – the people that are the most poor, outcast and forgotten.
This was what her mentor Hans Rosling asked her to do as his last dying wish.
Melinda found another marginalized group that lived and worked in the big cities of India. She went there in 2001 to investigate what the Foundation could do to slow the spread of AIDS.
What she found was that the only hope to stop the spread of AIDS in India was through the help of the most marginalized group there – sex workers.
Sex workers were women who had no other occupation available to them to earn money to feed and raise their children.
Two years later the Foundation launched an HIV prevention program for India that relied on the leadership of sex workers called Avahan “call to action”.
The sex workers would have their clients use condoms, and thus prevent them from getting AIDS and the spread of AIDS.
One year later, the Foundation found that the program wasn’t working.
The Foundation didn’t understand how hard and violent it was to be a sex worker.
If the sex worker asked their client to use a condom, they could get beaten up.
If they got caught carrying condoms, the police would beat them up and rape them.
The only way to prevent HIV was to prevent violence.
When they asked the sex workers how to prevent the violence, this is what they said.
“Today or tomorrow, one of us is going to get raped or beaten by the police. It happens all the time. If we can get a dozen women to come running whenever this happens, the police will stop doing it.” (p.248)
So they set up a network, where if a woman is attacked by the police she dials a three-digit code on a central phone and twelve to fifteen women come to the police station yelling and shouting. They bring a pro-bono lawyer and a media person.
They shout “We want her out now or there’s going to be a story in the news tomorrow!”
The police will back down and say “We didn’t know. We’re sorry.”
The system worked so well that sex workers in other cities wanted it too..
Avahan created small rooms that were community centers for sex workers to rest, talk, drink tea.
Later, the Foundation gave funding to test a drug that was not only effective in treating AIDS, but also effective in preventing AIDS.
They found oral prevention drugs can cut the risk of getting HIV through sex by more than 90 percent.
The problem was it required healthy people to take pills everyday. At risk groups wouldn’t do it – except gay white men in the United States and women sex workers in India.
Studies were done that showed 94 percent of Indian sex workers took the drugs faithfully and continuously.
A second study in 2011 in the British medical journal The Lancet showed that the intensity of the Avahan work correlated with lower HIV prevalence in a number of India’s most populous states.
“In the years since, it’s been well documented that sex workers’ insistence on condom use with their clients kept the epidemic from breaking more widely into the population.
These empowered women became indispensable partners in a national plan that saved millions of lives.” (p. 253)
Finding Our Voices
Melinda then talks about meeting Leymah Gbowee, who along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf launched the women’s peace movement to end the Liberian civil war.
They gathered protested and prayed for peace.
They pressured the President of Liberia to have peace talks with the rebels in Accra, Ghana.
Two hundred women sat outside the peace talks for weeks. They wouldn’t leave until a peace agreement was made.
Finally, a peace agreement was made and the civil war ended.
When we rise up with our voices we make changes that matter.
When we allow our hearts to break, feel our pain and absorb it…not pass it along to anyone else…then we create peace.
Women and men are both capable of this.
Outsiders are not the problem. Our urge to create outsiders is the problem.
We are One
She discusses the solution, which is to help all members of the community develop their gifts and talents and use them for the good of the community.
“Others have used their power to push people out. We have to use our power to bring people in. We can’t just add one more warring faction. We have to end factions. It’s the only way we become whole.” (p.262)
Melinda then talks about the end goal – which is for everyone to be connected and loved.
“We see ourselves in others. We see ourselves as others.
That is the moment of lift.” (p.264)
Conclusion
Melinda Gates stepped out of her comfort zone and wrote this book so that women could rise up and make the world a better place to live for everyone.
Reading this book I cried, the stories were both tragic and heroic.
It made me feel that my problems were very small and insignificant and that there was more that I could do to help.
The most effective methods I realized are community gatherings and dialogue and empathy…and to stand up and ask for what I want.
I live in a very wealthy country, and I am truly blessed.
I look forward to continuing to help empower working parents so that they have time to raise their children, and live a fulfilled home life.
Thank you Melinda for sharing your story, and rising up.