The Moment of Lift

by Melinda Gates

ISBN 978-1-250-31357-7

“The correlation is as nearly perfect as any you will find in the world of data. If you search for poverty, you will find women who don’t have power. If you explore prosperity, you will find women who do have power and use it.”

After leaving Microsoft to raise her three children, Melinda Gates and her husband created their foundation for charitable giving, with an emphasis on global health. For many years, Gates worked behind the scenes of the foundation, while her husband continued his work at Microsoft. But it would not be until 2012 that Gates stepped fully up into the public eye to sponsor the London Summit on Family Planning that she clearly emerged as a leader, and began to place greater emphasis on gender equity issues. Here, she makes her case for why lifting up women and girls has a profound and measurable impact on the very issues of global health and hunger that the foundation had been working on all along. On a personal level, she shares how she overcame her inclination towards privacy in order to become a stronger advocate for the issues she cares about. The author’s proceeds from the book will also be donated to charity.

The Moment of Lift chronicles the Gates Foundation’s slow tiptoe into gender equity work, an area that was long seen as a departure from their core mission of innovating in the arena of global health, and then helping partner organizations deliver those innovations to the people who needed them. Melinda Gates has a good eye for combining punchy facts with real-life illustrations of their principles, drawing on her extensive travels for the Gates Foundations to provide them. The book is divided into nine chapters that focus on issues the foundation has worked on, including family planning, child marriage, and access to education for girls.

Gates begins with the controversial issue that drove her into the public eye, as a Catholic who supported family planning and access to contraceptives. She writes about family planning with carefully chosen words, emphasizing how it allows women to choose when to have children, without ever mentioning whether. She largely avoids the issue of birth control for single women, and focuses on timing and spacing pregnancies for maternal and infant health, and is very clear about differentiating family planning from abortion. She speaks candidly about the political and religious implications that have become attendant on working on these areas, so her arguments are finely calibrated to try to avoid those pitfalls. These chapters feel very guarded, as if the author is braced for the inevitable blowback.

The Moment of Lift is a reflective book that examines what it takes to do effective philanthropy. Gates acknowledges that “we at the foundation were latecomers to using gender equity as a strategy. As a result, we have lost opportunities to maximize our impact.” She also examines the potential problems caused by huge influxes of money from outsiders who assume they know best. For example, partner organizations may chase the grant money, and in doing so commit to a less effective intervention strategy, simply because it is the idea being backed by the wealthy donor. She also repeatedly emphasizes the danger of not listening the people on the ground, both the local partners that will do the work, and the people who will receive the benefits, or harms, of the chosen approach. She provides multiple examples of situations where it was assumed that education was all that was needed, when in fact more complicated factors were at play. Sex workers in India in the 1990s already knew that they were at risk of HIV if they didn’t use condoms. They didn’t need education on that fact, or even better access to condoms. They needed clients not to beat them if they tried to initiate condom use, and they needed the police not to beat them if they were caught carrying condoms. To achieve that, they needed such beatings to have consequences, but it took non-profit organizations a long time to hear those women, and understand that the issue was violence, not sexual health education. These women were taking a longer-term risk, a costly gamble to avoid a guaranteed short-term consequence.

The chapters on women’s work—paid and unpaid—contain the most personal detail, both about Gates’ home life, and her time at Microsoft. She expresses a desire not to equate her experiences with those of the other women she writes about, but to demonstrate the breadth and reach of such issues of inequality. I was particularly interested in her reflection on how she contributed to a work environment that was hostile to the working style of women at Microsoft by initially trying to emulate the hard-charging, aggressive styles of the men she saw around her, some of whom later admitted that they too had only been trying to live up certain ideas about the successful businessman. Acting out roles we don’t believe in can help to perpetuate the systems that led to these harmful ideas in the first place.

Some of the stories Gates shares are hard ones, but she encourages the reader to “let your heart break” rather than turn away. As a book, The Moment of Lift is quiet rather than incendiary, but perhaps that will enable some to hear it who would otherwise cover their ears.

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