The Moment of Life: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates. 

5/5 rating. 224 pages.

Book #54 of 2020. Read August 9, 2020.

(This review was written between Melinda and Bill’s split.)

This is an incredible book by Melinda, one-half of the Gates Foundation which has done such amazing work around the world. I have complete reverence for what Melinda, and her husband Bill, are doing to make the world a better place. When I saw that she had written a book, I knew I needed to read it, and it did not disappoint! You need to read this book!

This book talks all about “How empowering women changes the world”. Melinda talks through a myriad of issues that are holding back women around the world: from family planning, to access to schools, to child marriage, and more. She is able to bring such poignant examples to the women suffering around the world through the work of her foundation, and of her experience working in tech. This book is all about feminism (though rarely explicitly stated through this label) in the true sense of the word: equality of the sexes. The issue is that men (and sometimes women, too), see this idea as dis-empowering men instead of lifting up women. The beautiful thing about equality is that it is NOT zero-sum! We all gain from empowered women!

We just need to care more about, and listen to, those on the margins.

“That’s what listening does. It opens you up. It draws out your love – and love is more urgent than doctrine.”

Melinda best sums up this book:

“Every issue in this book is a door women must walk through, or a wall we must break through, to become full contributors—the right to decide whether and when to have children, to marry or not marry, to seek opportunity, attend a university, control our income, manage our time, pursue our goals, and advance in the workplace—any workplace. For the sake of women trapped in poverty and for women at every level of society who are excluded or intimidated by powerful men, women need to meet, talk, organize, and lead—so we can break down the walls and open the doors for everyone.”

Quotes:

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” – Marianne Williamson

“How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings – and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity.”

“Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.”

“In his speeches, Bill used the example of a plane crash. If a plane crashes, three hundred people die, and it’s tragic for the families, and there’s an article in every newspaper. But on the same day, thirty thousand children die, and that’s tragic for the families, and there’s no article in any newspaper.”

“That was the biggest shock to my conscience: Millions of children were dying because they were poor, and we weren’t hearing about it because they were poor.”

“Another lesson we kept learning is that the problems of poverty and disease are always connected to each other. There are no isolated problems.”

“When women in developing countries space their births by at least three years, each baby is almost twice as likely to survive their first year – and 35 percent more likely to see their fifth birthday. That’s justification enough to expand access to contraceptives, but child survival is just one reason.”

“The reasons are simple: When the women were able to time and space their pregnancies, they were more likely to advance their education, earn an income, raise healthy children, and have the time and money to give each child the food, care, and education needed to thrive. When children reach their potential, they don’t end up poor. This is how families and countries get out of poverty. In fact, no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.”

“It took us years to learn that contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created.”

“The British medical journey The Lancet published a study funded by the UK government and our foundation showing that access to contraception would cut the number of mothers who die in childbirth by a third. A report by Save the Children said a million teenage girls die or are injured in childbirth every year, which makes pregnancy the number one cause of death for teen girls.”

“We didn’t know. But if we wanted to do the most good, we had to go where there’s the most harm – so we explored ways to save the lives of mothers and newborn babies.”

“At the time of my 2010 visit to Shivgarh, there were still 3 million newborn deaths in the world every year. Nearly 10 percent of those deaths occurred in Uttar Pradesh, which has been called the global epicenter of newborn and maternal deaths. If you wanted to bring down the number of newborn deaths, Uttar Pradesh was an important place to work.”

“This taught me in a profound way that you have to understand human needs in order to effectively deliver services and solutions to people.”

“If you don’t understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community’s practices, you won’t present your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won’t hear you.”

“It’s a delicate thing to initiate change in a traditional culture. It has to be done with the utmost care and respect. Transparency is crucial. Grievances must be heard. Failures must be acknowledged. Local people have to lead. Shared goals have to be emphasized. Messages have to appeal to people’s experience. The practice has to work clearly and quickly, and it’s important to emphasize the science.”

“Since the genocide, Rwanda has made more progress in making birth safer than almost any other nation in the world. Newborn mortality is down by 64 percent. Maternal mortality is down by 77 percent. A generation after Rwanda was considered a lost cause, its health system is studied as a model.”

“When you begin to understand the daily lives of the poor, it does more than give you the desire to help; it can often show you how.”

“Saving lives starts with bringing everyone in. Our societies will be healthiest when they have no outsiders. We should strive for that. We have to keep working to reduce poverty and disease. We have to help outsiders resist the power of people who want to keep them out. But we have to do our inner work as well: We have to wake up to the ways we exclude. We have to open our arms and our hearts to the people we’ve pushed to the margins. It’s not enough to help outsiders fight their way in—the real triumph will come when we no longer push anyone out.”

“When one person tells me a harsh truth, I can be sure that she’s speaking for others who aren’t as bold. It makes me pay better attention, and then I realize that others have been saying the same thing all along, just more softly. I haven’t heard it because I haven’t really been listening.”

“‘When you don’t do family planning,’ [Sadi Seynia, a Nigerian woman] said, ‘everybody in the family suffers. I’d have a baby on my back and another in my belly. My husband had to take on debt to cover the basics, but even that wasn’t enough. It’s complete suffering when you don’t do family planning, and I have lived that.’”

“Contraceptives save the lives of mothers and newborns. Contraceptives also reduce abortion. As a result of contraceptive use, there were 26 million fewer unsafe abortions in the world’s poorest countries in just one year, according to the most recent data.”

“I talked about the trip I had made a few years before to the poor Nairobi neighborhood of Korogocho, which means ‘shoulder to shoulder.’ I was discussing contraceptives there with a group of women, and one young mother named Marianne said, ‘Do you want to know why I use contraceptives?’ Then she held up her baby and said, ‘Because I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another.’ That desire is universal, but access to family planning is not.”

“That’s what listening does. It opens you up. It draws out your love – and love is more urgent than doctrine.”

“Great schools don’t just teach you; they change you.”

“The unpaid work a woman does in the home is a barrier to the activities that can advance her—getting more education, earning outside income, meeting with other women, becoming politically active. Unequal unpaid work blocks a woman’s path to empowerment.”

“Men who share caregiving duties are happier. They have better relationships. They have happier children.”

“The moral of the story to me was that a man can call another man and share advice about how to improve their marriages—that men can play a role as guardians and supporters of the union.”

“From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” 

“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.”

“I’ve never held the view that women are better than men, or that the best way to improve the world is for women to gain more power than men. I think male dominance is harmful to society because any dominance is harmful: It means society is governed by a false hierarchy where power and opportunity are awarded according to gender, age, wealth, and privilege—not according to skill, effort, talent, or accomplishments. When a culture of dominance is broken, it activates power in all of us. So the goal for me is not the rise of women and the fall of man. It is the rise of both women and men from a struggle for dominance to a state of partnership.”

“Change comes when men see the benefits of women’s power—not just what women can do that men cannot, but a quality of relationship that comes in an equal partnership that cannot come in a hierarchical relationship: a sense of bonding, of belonging, of community, solidarity, and wholeness born of a promise that I will help you when your burdens are high, and you will help me when your burdens are low. These forces create the most rewarding feelings in life—an experience of love and union that is not possible or available to partners who struggle alone. It can turn a hierarchical relationship into an equal one, and it comes from women asserting themselves. That is why we women have to lift each other up—not to replace men at the top of the hierarchy, but to become partners with men in ending hierarchy.”

“For girls age 15 to 19 around the world, the leading cause of death is childbirth.”

“On our drive out, Molly explained to me that the empathy barrier stymies all efforts in development. Agricultural equipment that had been donated was rusting out, health clinics were sitting empty, and customs like female genital cutting and child marriage continued unchanged. Molly told me that people often get outraged by certain practices in developing countries and want to rush in and say, ‘This is harmful! Stop it!’ But that’s the wrong approach. Outrage can save one girl or two, she told me. Only empathy can change the system.”

“A landmark 2011 study from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization showed that women farmers in developing countries achieve 20–30 percent lower yields than men even though they are just as good at farming. The women underproduce because they do not have the access to the resources and information that men do. If they had the same resources, they would have the same yields.”

“But the lack of paid maternity leave—and paid parental leave—is an embarrassing sign of a society that does not value families and does not listen to women.”

“The Catholic Church tries to shut down the discussion of women priests by saying that Jesus chose men as his apostles at the Last Supper, and therefore only men are allowed to be priests. But we could as easily say that the Risen Christ appeared first to a woman and told her to go tell the men, and therefore only women are allowed to bring the Good News to the men.”

“Being yourself sounds like a saccharine prescription for how to make it in an aggressive culture. But it’s not as sweet as it sounds. It means not acting in a way that’s false just to fit in. It’s expressing your talents, values, and opinions in your style, defending your rights, and never sacrificing your self-respect. That is power.”

“If we want a society that reflects the values of empathy, unity, and diversity, it matters who writes the code.”

“I am not saying that women should be given positions in tech that they haven’t earned. I’m saying women have earned them and should be hired for them.”

“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.”

“The United States is one of only seven countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave—joining the company of Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a handful of other island nations. This is startling evidence that the United States is far behind the rest of the world in honoring the needs of families.”

“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. A male-dominated culture is more likely to emphasize paid leave’s near-term costs and minimize its long-term benefits. There are huge personal benefits to workplaces that honor the obligations of family life, and those personal benefits turn into social and economic benefits as well.”

“Melinda, if you remember only one thing I’ve told you, remember that you have to go to the people on the margins.” – Hans Rosling

“When he pleaded for an answer, the woman said, ‘She was crying because you, a respectable man, had come to meet her and talk to her politely as opposed to paying her for sex, and she thought it was such an honor that someone would come just to have tea with her.’”

“We women in these communities are the nurturers of society. And it was upon us to change it.”

“‘There was one Muslim woman who had lost her daughter in the war,’ Leymah said. ‘She was part of our movement. She was feeding a fighter who had multiple gunshot wounds when he recognized her and said, “Sit me up.” So she sat him up and he asked her, “Where’s your daughter?” She said, “Oh, she died.” The fighter said, “I know.” She said, “How did you know?” He said, “Because I killed her.” When she came back to the office, crying, we asked her, “Did you stop feeding him?” and she said, “No. Isn’t that what peace means? Besides, I knew at that moment that I could come back to my sisters and we could cry together.”‘”

“When the women found their voice, the men found their power to make peace. Each found the traditional attributes of the other inside themselves. The men were able to do something the women had done—agree not to retaliate—and the women were able to do something the men had done, which is to assert their views about how society should be run. Bringing these two qualities together is what brought peace.”

“There is a big difference between a loud voice and a strong voice. The loud voice of a man who has no inner life and is a stranger to his own grief is never a voice for justice; it’s a voice for self-interest, dominance, or vengeance. Strong male voices for freedom and dignity come from men like Gandhi, King, and Mandela who mastered their pain, gave up on vengeance, and preached forgiveness.”

“Every society says its outsiders are the problem. But the outsiders are not the problem; the urge to create outsiders is the problem. Overcoming that urge is our greatest challenge and our greatest promise. It will take courage and insight, because the people we push to the margins are the ones who trigger in us the feelings we’re afraid of.”

“It is much easier to accept the inability to speak, walk, or feed oneself than it is to accept the inability to be of special value to another person. We human beings can suffer immense deprivations with great steadfastness, but when we sense that we no longer have anything to offer to anyone, we quickly lose our grip on life.” – Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved

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