The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World - Hardcover

French Gates, Melinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250313570 ISBN 13: 9781250313577

Verlag: Flatiron Books, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"In her book, Melinda tells the stories of the inspiring people she's met through her work all over the world, digs into the data, and powerfully illustrates issues that need our attention--from child marriage to gender inequity in the workplace." -- President Barack Obama

"The Moment of Lift is an urgent call to courage. It changed how I think about myself, my family, my work, and what's possible in the world. Melinda weaves together vulnerable, brave storytelling and compelling data to make this one of those rare books that you carry in your heart and mind long after the last page." -- Brené Brown, Ph.D., author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Dare to Lead

"Melinda Gates has spent many years working with women around the world. This book is an urgent manifesto for an equal society where women are valued and recognized in all spheres of life. Most of all, it is a call for unity, inclusion and connection. We need this message more than ever." -- Malala Yousafzai

"Melinda Gates's book is a lesson in listening. A powerful, poignant, and ultimately humble call to arms." -- Tara Westover, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Educated

A debut from Melinda French Gates, a timely and necessary call to action for women's empowerment.

"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."

For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

In this moving and compelling book, Melinda shares lessons she's learned from the inspiring people she's met during her work and travels around the world. As she writes in the introduction, "That is why I had to write this book--to share the stories of people who have given focus and urgency to my life. I want all of us to see ways we can lift women up where we live."

Melinda's unforgettable narrative is backed by startling data as she presents the issues that most need our attention--from child marriage to lack of access to contraceptives to gender inequity in the workplace. And, for the first time, she writes about her personal life and finding her voice. Throughout, she shows how there has never been more opportunity to change the world--and ourselves.

Writing with emotion, candor, and grace, she introduces us to remarkable women and shows the power of connecting with one another.

When we lift others up, they lift us up, too.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melinda French Gates is a philanthropist, businesswoman, and global advocate for women and girls.

For over 25 years, Melinda has led efforts to unlock a healthier, more prosperous, more equal future. Today, she heads Pivotal, an organization she formed in 2015 that works to accelerate the pace of progress and advance women's power and influence in the U.S. and around the world. Previously, she founded and co-chaired the Gates Foundation, where, for more than two decades, she set the direction and priorities of the world's largest philanthropy. Melinda is also the author of the bestselling book The Moment of Lift and the creator of Moment of Lift Books, an imprint publishing original nonfiction by visionaries working to unlock a more equal world.

Melinda grew up in Dallas, Texas and attended Duke University, where she received a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics and an MBA. She spent the first decade of her career developing multimedia products at Microsoft before leaving the company to focus on her family and philanthropic work. Melinda has three children--Jenn, Rory, and Phoebe--and lives in Seattle, Washington.

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The Moment of Lift

How Empowering Women Changes the World

By Melinda Gates

Flatiron Books

Copyright © 2019 Melinda Gates
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-31357-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Introduction, 
Chapter One The Lift of a Great Idea, 
Chapter Two Empowering Mothers: Maternal and Newborn Health, 
Chapter Three Every Good Thing: Family Planning, 
Chapter Four Lifting Their Eyes: Girls in Schools, 
Chapter Five The Silent Inequality: Unpaid Work, 
Chapter Six When a Girl Has No Voice: Child Marriage, 
Chapter Seven Seeing Gender Bias: Women in Agriculture, 
Chapter Eight Creating a New Culture: Women in the Workplace, 
Chapter Nine Let Your Heart Break: The Lift of Coming Together, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgments, 
Resource Guide of Organizations That Readers Can Support, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

The Lift of a Great Idea

Let me start with some background. I attended Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Dallas. In my senior year, I took a campus tour of Duke University and was awed by its computer science department. That decided it for me. I enrolled at Duke and graduated five years later with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's in business. Then I got a job offer from IBM, where I had worked for several summers, but I turned it down to take a job at a smallish software company called Microsoft. I spent nine years there in various positions, eventually becoming general manager of information products. Today I work in philanthropy, spending most of my time searching for ways to improve people's lives — and often worrying about the people I will fail if I don't get it right. I'm also the wife of Bill Gates. We got married on New Year's Day in 1994. We have three children.

That's the background. Now let me tell you a longer story — about my path to women's empowerment and how, as I've worked to empower others, others have empowered me.

* * *

In the fall of 1995, after Bill and I had been married nearly two years and were about to leave on a trip to China, I discovered I was pregnant. This China trip was a huge deal for us. Bill rarely took time off from Microsoft, and we were going with other couples as well. I didn't want to mess up the trip, so I considered not telling Bill I was pregnant until we came back. For a day and a half, I thought, I'll just save the news. Then I realized, No, I've got to tell him because what if something goes wrong? And, more basically, I've got to tell him because it's his baby, too.

When I sat Bill down for the baby talk one morning before work, he had two reactions. He was thrilled about the baby, and then he said, "You considered not telling me? Are you kidding?"

It hadn't taken me long to come up with my first bad parenting idea.

We went to China and had a fantastic trip. My pregnancy didn't affect things except for one moment when we were in an old museum in Western China and the curator opened an ancient mummy case; the smell sent me hurtling outside to avoid a rush of morning sickness — which I learned can come at any time of day! One of my girlfriends who saw me race out said to herself, "Melinda's pregnant."

On the way home from China, Bill and I split off from the group to get some time alone. During one of our talks, I shocked Bill when I said, "Look, I'm not going to keep working after I have this baby. I'm not going back." He was stunned. "What do you mean, you're not going back?" And I said, "We're lucky enough not to need my income. So this is about how we want to raise a family. You're not going to downshift at work, and I don't see how I can put in the hours I need to do a great job at work and raise a family at the same time."

I'm offering you a candid account of this exchange with Bill to make an important point at the very start: When I first confronted the questions and challenges of being a working woman and a mother, I had some growing up to do. My personal model back then — and I don't think it was a very conscious model — was that when couples had children, men worked and women stayed home. Frankly, I think it's great if women want to stay home. But it should be a choice, not something we do because we think we have no choice. I don't regret my decision. I'd make it again. At the time, though, I just assumed that's what women do.

In fact, the first time I was asked if I was a feminist, I didn't know what to say because I didn't think of myself as a feminist. I'm not sure I knew then what a feminist was. That was when our daughter Jenn was a little less than a year old.

Twenty-two years later, I am an ardent feminist. To me, it's very simple. 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.

This isn't something I could have said with total conviction even ten years ago. It came to me only after many years of listening to women — often women in extreme hardship whose stories taught me what leads to inequity and how human beings flourish.

But those insights came to me later. Back in 1996, I was seeing everything through the lens of the gender roles I knew, and I told Bill, "I'm not going back."

This threw Bill for a loop. Me being at Microsoft was a huge part of our life together. Bill cofounded the company in 1975. I joined Microsoft in 1987, the only woman in the first class of MBAs. We met shortly afterward, at a company event. I was on a trip to New York for Microsoft, and my roommate (we doubled up back then to save money) told me to come to a dinner I hadn't known about. I showed up late, and all the tables were filled except one, which still had two empty chairs side by side. I sat in one of them. A few minutes later, Bill arrived and sat in the other.

We talked over dinner that evening, and I sensed that he was interested, but I didn't hear from him for a while. Then one Saturday afternoon we ran into each other in the company parking lot. He struck up a conversation and asked me out for two weeks from Friday. I laughed and said, "That's not spontaneous enough for me. Ask me out closer to the date," and I gave him my number. Two hours later, he called me at home and invited me out for that evening. "Is this spontaneous enough for you?" he asked.

We found we had a lot in common. We both love puzzles, and we both love to compete. So we had puzzle contests and played math games. I think he got intrigued when I beat him at a math game and won the first time we played Clue, the board game where you figure out who did the murder in what room with what weapon. He urged me to read The Great Gatsby, his favorite novel, and I already had, twice. Maybe that's when he knew he'd met his match. His romantic match, he would say. I knew I'd met my match when I saw his music collection — lots of Frank Sinatra and Dionne Warwick. When we got engaged, someone asked Bill, "How does Melinda make you feel?" and he answered, "Amazingly, she makes me feel like getting married."

Bill and I also shared a belief in the power and importance of software. We knew that writing software for personal computers would give individuals the computing power that institutions had, and democratizing computing would change the world. That's why we...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Flatiron Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250313570
• ISBN 13: 9781250313577
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: FLATIRON BOOKS; https://www.flatironbooks.com/; ; 120 Broadway; New York; NY; 10271; USA
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