The Moment of Lift — Melinda Gates
The book is about the how great impact it would be if all the women across the globe were uplifted. When you lift women, you lift families, society and eventually help in transforming the whole world. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high leverage investment you can make in human beings. Women have this inherent power within themselves and are capable of transforming the world to be a better place. In this book, Melinda walks us across various inspiring stories that she came across while meeting people from all over the world during the formation of Melinda and Bill foundation.
The basis of this foundation was when Warren Buffet had gifted them with a present (in form of huge amount of money). With this gift, Melinda was determined to make the best use of this gift which would be in form of helping the society. Along with her busy schedule of managing a growing family and working at Microsoft, she decided to devote a part of herself in this noble foundation. As she travelled the world for this noble cause, especially rural areas of various countries, she tried to understand their pain, their agonies etc. As she spoke to different women from rural areas, she noticed the reason for their continuing poverty. There were women with numerous kids and very low income which was not enough to serve the entire family. As Melinda was also going through the phase of growing her family, she could immediately connect to the situation these grieving women were going through. It was the need of contraceptives that these women were looking for so that they can bear kids when they want. With this realization, she made sure that their foundation supplies contraceptives in abundance to ensured that it reaches to all the remote villages where there is a dire need of these. This was the first lesson that was learnt hard by Melinda. The next thing, which was personally very touching to me was her exposure to the ill practices on women in these remote villages. She heard agonizing stories of female genital cutting where the clitoris of the young girls were cut off so that they remain devoid of the sexual pleasure. She heard various stories of how the young girls got married early, left their families, started living with their husband and family, doing all the household chores the whole day. Looking at this in general, Melinda realized that this grave and deep problem could not be solved just by educating women. Men need to contribute as well and this brings up to the second big realization that happened to her that if men started helping women in household chores, then women could be independent and have a good balanced life. Melinda shares her own story with her relationship with Bill and since he started spending more time doing household chores, taking care of kids, she was relieved of those duties which lead her to focus on her aspirations.
Once this goal was achieved, she thought about widening her perspective and decided to spent more time with the foundation, visiting various places and promoting the idea of men helping out the women and to treat women as equal partners in life.
