The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

by Melinda French Gates

How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings—and especially for women?

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.

Mrs. Bauer replied, “If you buy them, I’ll learn how to teach them.”

Mrs. Bauer spent her own time and money to drive to North Texas State University to study computer science at night so she could teach us in the morning.

I realize in looking back that I faced a life-forming question in those early years: “Do you want to have a career or do you want to be a stay-at-home mom?” And my answer was “Yes!”

(When the kids started in school, we enrolled them with my family name, French, so they would have some anonymity.)

Sometimes new facts and insights don’t register until you hear them from several sources, and then everything starts coming together.

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.

I thought, Wow, am I going to step publicly into something as political as family planning, with my church and many conservatives so opposed to it?

“If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will.” If I didn’t fill my schedule with things I felt were important, other people would fill my schedule with things they felt were important.

I have always carried in my head images of the women I’ve met, and I keep photographs of the ones who have moved me the most.

I was near tears and kept thinking, No way. I’m already doing my part and it’s more than I can handle, and there is already a ton of work ahead on family planning alone to meet the goals we just declared—never mind a wider women’s agenda.

Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts; it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way.

Poverty is not being able to protect your family. Poverty is not being able to save your children when mothers with more money could. And because the strongest instinct of a mother is to protect her children, poverty is the most disempowering force on earth.

One of the life-saving practices Ruchi had learned was skin-to-skin care: holding a baby against the mother’s skin to transfer warmth from the mom to the newborn.

What do I mean by a “delivery system”? Getting tools to people who need them in ways that encourage people to use them—that is a delivery system. It is crucial, and it is often complex. It can require getting around barriers of poverty, distance, ignorance, doubt, stigma, and religious and gender bias. It means listening to people, learning what they want, what they’re doing, what they believe, and what barriers they face. It means paying attention to how people live their lives. That’s what you need to do if you have a life-saving tool or technique you want to deliver to people.

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.

That is how India became polio free—through massive, heroic, original, and ingenious delivery.

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.

Unmarried women weren’t given the legal right to contraceptives until Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972.

I was singled out for criticism in a front-page story in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper. I had “gone astray,” it said, and was “confused by misinformation.” It went on to say that every foundation is free to donate to whatever cause it wants, but not “to persist in disinformation and present things in a false way.”

Stigma is one of the biggest barriers to women’s health, and people in Tupange figured out that sometimes the best way to weaken a stigma is to defy it openly.

She probably didn’t even know how bold she was being. But the women around her knew it—and they didn’t tell her to be quiet, which in a way made Sona the spokeswoman for the group, saying what the mothers believed but didn’t quite have the nerve to say.

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

So in 1997, a man named José Gómez de León and his colleagues put forward a new idea. They believed that women and girls were “agents of development,” and they put that belief into practice. The government would treat education as if it were a job and pay families to send their kids to school.

Each BRAC school set its own schedule to accommodate the growing season, so that families who relied on girls’ farm labor could send their daughters to school.

Kakenya had the courage to defy tradition, but she also had the wisdom to make it work in her favor.

This means that, on average, women do seven years more of unpaid work than men over their lifetimes. That’s about the time it takes to complete a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.

May/June 1999... 20 years ago today.

That soft side of Bill might surprise people, especially those who’ve seen the competitive, combative Bill.

That was a turning point for me. I honestly hadn’t realized how passionate I was about the work until I heard myself talking about it in public with Bill and Warren.

The first time Bill and I sat down to write our Annual Letter together, I thought we were going to kill each other.

Mabel van Oranje

Mabel was the first person who showed me the connection between family planning and child marriage.

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

The girl in India had an app on her phone called Bandhan Tod, meaning “break your shackles.”

It’s important to be able to save girls from marriage, but it’s more important to address the incentives that prompt parents to marry off their underage daughters in the first place.

When a family can receive money for marrying off a daughter, they have one fewer mouth to feed and more resources to help everyone else. When a family has to pay to marry off a daughter, the younger the girl, the less her family pays in dowry. In both cases, the incentives strongly favor early marriage. And every year a girl doesn’t marry, there’s a greater chance that she will be sexually assaulted—and then considered unclean and unfit for marriage. So it’s also with the girl’s honor and the family’s honor in mind that parents often marry their girls young, so they can avoid that trauma.

Outrage can save one girl or two, she told me. Only empathy can change the system.

Tostan, a Wolof word that refers to the instant a baby chick pierces through its shell for the first time. The English translation is “breakthrough.”

Farmers need five things to succeed: good land, good seeds, farming supplies, time, and know-how.

In the article, I acknowledged that we at the foundation were latecomers in using gender equity as a strategy. “As a result, we have lost opportunities to maximize our impact,” I wrote. But our foundation would now “put women and girls at the center of global development,” because “we cannot achieve our goals unless we systematically address gender inequalities and meet the specific needs of women and girls in the countries where we work.”

One hundred and four countries have laws that put certain jobs off-limits for women.

Seventeen countries have laws that limit when and how women can travel outside the home.

Twenty-nine countries restrict the hours women can work.

Thirty-six countries have rules limiting what wives can inherit from their husbands.

Thirty-nine countries have laws that keep daughters from inheriting the same proportion of assets as sons.

In 113 countries, there are no laws that ensure equal pay for equal work by men and women.

In eighteen countries, men can legally prohibit their wives from working.

It’s not a standard political debate when an argument for equality is called blasphemy.