The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

The Moment of Lift seamlessly interweaves the personal with the scientific. Much of the book centers on Melinda Gates’s experiences and those of people she encountered in her philanthropic work. She balances these anecdotes with sections consisting entirely of data. Gates’s anecdotes draw readers into the narrative while the statistics support her claims.

In Chapter 1, Gates uses anecdotes to engage readers and evoke empathy. She describes her first philanthropic research trip with her husband. The pair flew to Africa in 1993, seven years before establishing the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. The goal of the trip was twofold: 1) To learn about the needs of the people they were trying to help and 2) To use this information to make informed decisions about how to best invest their money. Gates’s memories of the gendered division of labor in Africa are vivid:

[She saw] a mother who was carrying a baby in her belly, another baby on her back, and a pile of sticks on her head. She had clearly been walking a long distance with no shoes, while the men I saw were wearing flip-flops and smoking cigarettes with no sticks on their heads or kids at their sides (14).

Later trips revealed similar inequities. In Malawi, for instance, Gates noted that women were the ones who brought their children to see doctors, often walking for days to reach the clinics. Many also desired access to convenient contraceptives. Encounters like these laid the groundwork for Gates’s early philanthropy, which centered on the health of women and children on the margins of society.

Gates presents data alongside anecdotes to stress the importance of the foundation’s work. For example: In 2012, more than 200 million women in the world’s 69 poorest countries did not have access to contraceptives, even though they wanted to use them. Millions of women were getting pregnant too young, too soon after their last pregnancy, and too often to remain healthy. Studies show that infant death rates drop when women in developing countries space their births by three years or more; these children are 35% more likely to live to the age of five (18). Expanding the use of contraceptives is key to saving children’s lives.

In the 1970s, public health workers gave contraceptives to half of the women in several Bangladeshi villages; the other half received nothing. Twenty years later, the study’s results proved the benefits of contraceptives: “The mothers who took contraceptives were healthier. Their children were better nourished. Their families had more wealth. The women had higher wages. Their sons and daughters had more schooling” (18). A study from The Lancet, an English medical journal co-funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK government revealed that access to contraceptives cuts childbirth mortality rates by a third (22). According to humanitarian aid organization Save the Children, one million girls are injured during or die in childbirth each year, making pregnancy the leading cause of death for teen girls (22). Gates cites these studies to convey the importance of the foundation’s family planning efforts, of contraceptives being “the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created” (19).

Gates’s focus was and continues to be uplifting girls and women. As such, it’s a central theme in her memoir. Gates didn’t set out to become a women’s advocate. Her early focus at the foundation was global health, including maternal and childhood care; her realization that empowering women could improve entire communities came later. She uses striking imagery to describe this realization: “It was like a slow-rising sun, gradually dawning on me—part of an awakening shared and accelerated by others” (27).