Understanding ‘The Moment of Lift’
By M. CLARE HAEFNER
Melinda Gates is on a mission to change the world by empowering women. She wants to give women their moment of lift — a chance to fly, to use their voice, to pursue their potential and to break down barriers that hold them back.
“Sometimes all it takes to lift women up is to stop pulling them down,” she writes in The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World (Flatiron Books, 2019).
From her beginning as a programmer at Microsoft to her current role as a philanthropist at the helm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda Gates shares her motivations, the lessons she’s learned and the stories of others who have inspired her along the way.
A key lesson: Building empathy is the catalyst for change because it creates common ground.
Chapter by chapter, Gates shares stories of women (and men) who changed the way she sees the world. Their experiences helped the Gates Foundation focus its goals and redefine its mission. “If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high- leverage investment you can make in human beings,” Gates writes. And this lift doesn’t come at the expense of men, rather it aims to help women become equal partners in ending hierarchy.
She tackles family planning, education and gender bias. A chapter on child marriage is brutal to read, but necessary to understand the dire situations so many girls are born into, such as an 8-year-old bride-to-be who knows marriage will close the door to education and any chance that she’ll achieve her dreams.
A chapter on equal partnerships and the value of unpaid work was eye-opening. Even in America, women are often saddled with the expectation of raising their families and running their homes, even if they have full-time jobs. Gates writes, “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 economists were not counting this as work.”
The Moment of Lift is filled with heart-rending yet inspiring stories, including a young girl who dared to ask for a teacher even though her parents were trash-pickers who belonged to the lowest caste of Indian society. Gates writes that she doesn’t have “any idea how people find the guts to speak up against waves of tradition, but when they do, they always end up with followers who have the same conviction but not quite the same courage. That’s how leaders are born.”
Another chapter on women in the workplace brought to mind challenges I’ve faced and gave me a greater connection to Gates as she shares her own struggles. Through her straight-forward writing and willingness to share her fragility and fears, her experience becomes relatable. She writes that “most of us fall into one of the same three groups: the people who try to create outsiders, the people who are made to feel like outsiders, and the people who stand by and don’t stop it.”
The Moment of Lift made me cry. It made me cringe. It made me laugh. It filled me with hope and inspired me to do what I can to give back, to love others without limits, to lift them up.
