Melinda Gates: 'The Moment of Lift'

I originally wrote this post for the Shanghai Value Investing Club’s annual book review. I took a risk with my choice as the topic is not what you’d normally expect for a group of investors. But this book was the most important I read this year and so worthy of discussion.

“Moment of Lift” by Melinda Gates

Good investors work hard to identify and correct their blind spots.  This year, on my wife’s recommendation, I read “Moment of Lift” by Melinda Gates and realised I had a glaring blind spot when it came to gender equality and its importance to my personal relationships and the wellbeing of society.

I didn’t know much about Gates beforehand except that she is the wife of Bill, co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men.  In fact, Gates is an impressive character in her own right, having studied Computer Science and Business at one of America’s top universities before becoming one of Microsoft’s first female employees and one of its youngest executives.  This book articulates the most important lesson she has learned since founding the Gates Foundation twenty years ago: “if you want to lift up humanity, empower women.  It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings”. 

Her logic is clear: “The correlation is as nearly perfect as any you will find in the world of data. If you search for poverty, you will find women who don’t have power. If you explore prosperity, you will find women who do have power and use it. When women can decide whether and when to have children; when women can decide whether and when and whom to marry; when women have access to healthcare, do only our fair share of unpaid labour, get the education we want, make the financial decisions we need, are treated with respect at work, enjoy the same rights as men, and rise up with the help of other women and men who train us in leadership and sponsor us for high positions—then women flourish … and our families and communities flourish with us.”

The book starts with a discussion of contraception, which Gates calls “the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created”.  Research has shown that women who can time and control the number of children they have are healthier and economically better off.  Moreover, their children are healthier too.  As Gates points out, “no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives”.  However, because contraception gives women back control over reproduction, it directly challenges traditional power structures in many societies, often leading to stigmatisation and outright hostility.  This spurs a discussion through the rest of the book on why those power structures exist, and how their dismantling can bring women back in from the margins of society for the better of everyone. 

Having travelled the world for her Foundation, Gates shares many touching stories about impoverished women everywhere.  But the book’s most powerful and candid story is her own.  Gates was raised Catholic and faith was central to her family’s values.  However, her use of and advocacy for contraception put her in direct conflict with her church’s teachings.  This was a real struggle for her, a personal and spiritual dilemma.  And her decision to defy her church to do what she thought was best for her and her family was not without cost.  I hope her courage inspires others. 

Gates says that, “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”.  By that definition, I can’t see why we shouldn’t all be feminists.  If you are a father and hope for a better world for your daughter, then you should lead by example in the way you treat your wife, your mother, your sisters and other women today. 

Fortunately, Gates show us how, this time by sharing intimate details of her relationship with Bill, and the quandaries she faced as a wife, mother and partner at their Foundation.  These are very personal stories and again, it must have taken great courage for a shy soul like her to open up.  Her most basic relationship advice is to recognise and value the unpaid work that most women are simply expected to do like cooking, cleaning and childcare.  Make these ‘our responsibilities’ – not ‘her responsibilities’ – and you will remove a major barrier towards her empowerment.

And what’s not to like about empowerment?  As Gates says, “change comes when men see the benefits of women’s power—not just what women can do that men cannot, but a quality of relationship that comes in an equal partnership that cannot come in a hierarchical relationship: a sense of bonding, of belonging, of community, solidarity, and wholeness born of a promise that I will help you when your burdens are high, and you will help me when your burdens are low. These forces create the most rewarding feelings in life—an experience of love and union that is not possible or available to partners who struggle alone. It can turn a hierarchical relationship into an equal one, and it comes from women asserting themselves.”  If Bill Gates could help his wife by making time to take his daughter to school, why can’t we all?

I read this book on a flight from Hong Kong to London in February, in what now feels like another life.  As much as the world has changed in the last ten months, Gates’ core message stays true – and perhaps even more so as COVID puts added pressures on working mothers.  This book is fun and easy to read, while also being deeply personal and highly moving.  Gates’ arguments are borne out by a wealth of data and personal experience, which will inform the novice reader as much as they will encourage the ardent advocate.  She doesn’t lecture, she doesn’t hector and nor does she victimise.  She helped me, as a man, to realise that in many ways, I was perpetuating inequality without even realising it.  Such is the luxury of being part of the privileged group. 

I strongly recommend this book and its teachings for their message of hope, and as a way for you to begin changing your world today.