Description
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Moment of Lift
How Empowering Women Changes the World
By Melinda Gates Flatiron BooksCopyright © 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