“The Moment of Lift” is an accessible book written for gender equality, and more widely, although it is probably not her intention, for equality in general.
Melinda Gates brings us her experience as a working woman, an IT executive in a competitive corporative environment in her twenties, a wife, a mother and her experience as one of her Humanitarian Foundation managers.
She mostly brings us, generously, a distilled account of her learnings stemming out of her many travels and of her crucial conversations over the years with leading experts in the world on how to alleviate poverty, sufferings and discrimination, or simply how to extend the care of one's household to the care for humanity
I just wrote a few key moments. You may owe this to my dog who ate the book cover and a few pages, this led me to an urge to save some pieces :)
This book invites to openness.
I added some of my understanding too, as a translator, a migrant, the mother of a disabled child, a woman having worked in an IT corporation, a woman who hasn't had access to her rights, nor family support when she needed it the most.
All my life, I had assumed that Western societies were providing the basics for those most in need. I found out that it is not necessarily the case unless you were able to put a huge fight for your rights. The rights were not necessarily denied, in theory, but were not accessible in practice. I am talking about the right to have access to a fair divorce trial (years of waiting time, and tens of thousands of dollars), or timely access to welfare support (without having to resort to lengthy administrative tribunal appeals). This came as a surprise to me, especially after the #metoo movement... There is still a huge gap between theory and practice. I only found out about all that when I was on the margins. I had to pick my battles, there were so many. I wan some but I wish I didn't have to fight so hard in such moments of distress.
Much work remains for gender equality, and for sure, for equality in general...
Why do we make people in the margins invisible? (people with disabilities, migrants, LGBTQ community, women). All of us have been outsiders one time in our life, maybe in the playground. And none of us like it. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. If we are in the inside and see someone in the outside, we often say to ourselves, "I am not in this situation because I'm different" (or as a former Australian PM said "because some people don't make the right choices"). This kind of discourse is only pride talking. The truth is that anyone could easily be that person. We just don't want to confess to people and to ourselves what we have in common with outsiders because it is too humbling: it suggests that maybe success and failure aren't entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts giving up your sense of superiority, and say "I am not better than others". So instead, we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We stigmatise and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid, who make us see what we don't want to see. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we are the most afraid we will find in ourselves, our fear of vulnerability. We have to wake up to the ways we exclude.
In Life and beyond, Nouwen writes: "In my community, there are many severely handicapped men and women, and the greatest source of suffering is not always the handicap itself, but the accompanying feelings" ... "We human beings can suffer immense deprivations with steadfastness, but we sense that when we no longer have anything to offer, we quickly lose our grip on life." All we want is something to offer. This is how we belong. If we want everyone to belong, then we have to help everyone develop their talent and use their gift for the use of the community. That is what inclusion means: everyone is a contributor.
Stigma - stigma is always an effort to suppress someone's voice. It forces people to hide in shame, The best way to fight back stigma is to speak up - to say openly the very thing that others stigmatize. It is a direct attack on the self-censorship that stigma needs to survive.
About family planning, which is a big part of Melinda's work. When you get men on board, their wives use contraceptives nearly universally. The argument to them is that family planning will make their children healthier, stronger and more intelligent, and because fathers see intelligent children as proof of their own intelligence, they're open to this argument. To get religious leaders on board, she points out the bible verse I Timothy 5:8: "And whoever does not provide for relatives and especially family members has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr: "Only love can safely handle power". The first defence against a culture who hates you is a person who loves you, a person who want you to flourish, a person who restores your self image. A girl who is given love and support can start to break the self-image that keeps her down. When a girl sees she can learn, she learns, she sees her own gifts.
About non paid work. Marilyn Waring (NZ parliament, 1975) calculated that if you hired workers at the normal market rate to do all the unpaid work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector of the global economy. And yet, economists were not counting this as work.
I have to add something younger people don't realise: it also reflected in superannuation retirement savings that most men 'don't share or share symbolically only', which means that the economic abuse continues in retirement for many women stuck in unequal/undesirable relationships for economics reasons in their later years when they are the most vulnerable, since the husband (often) has not been educated in fairly contributing to her super for the non paid work and her loss of career advancement or prospect for years. Still very much 'unspoken', and this should be both ways. Men who take the bulk of looking after their children should be able to retire fairly as well.
The problem of low self-esteem - A Hewlett Packard study shows that women apply for promotions when they think they can meet 100 percent of the job requirements, as men do when they meet 60 percent. It is complicated by what is expected from women to gain a promotion, and which is different than for men. 'women may be less assertive from a lack of confidence or out of calculation, but male-dominated cultures remain a key underlying cause for both. There is social approval for women who don't ask for much, who show self-doubt, who don't seek power, who won't speak out, who aim to please.' A 2018 Atlantic article cites as study that says women with self-confidence gained influence "only when they also displayed ... the motivation to benefit others". If women showed confidence without empathy or altruism, they face sanctions for failing to conform to social norms.
Furthermore, these gender expectations foster qualities that lead to perfectionism - the effort to compensate for feelings of inferiority by being flawless. "If I look perfect and do everything perfect, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgement and blame."
This is giving too much credit to the wrong people and sentiments. We need to be kind to ourselves as well.
Sharing our stories and the need for privacy - Melinda says she shares her and the stories of women who have entrusted her for the sake of others. She believes that women gain equality, not couple by couple at a time, but by changing the culture, and we can change the culture by sharing our stories. It is practicing knowing and living each other deeply in mutually liberating relationships.
Likewise, for people who try to help others, trying to help people while keeping them at a safe distance cannot truly help them or heal us. We have to open up to others. We have to give up the need to be separate and superior. Then, we can help. Working on ourselves while working for others is the inner and outer work where the effort to change the world and change ourselves come together. Rene Brown says that the original definition of courage is to let ourselves be seen.
What holds many women back: we often have to convince ourselves that we deserve an equal partnership before we get one. The dominant culture is deeply ingrained, and we believe what the dominant voices are saying even when it is pure gibberish, because it is dominant and incessant reminder in all we do (publicists know it well), so the change is not only on the men's side, many women hold back other women.
When does change come? change comes when men see the benefits of women's power, when they realise that they prefer equal relationships that comes with an equal partnership '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 available to partners who struggle alone in unequal relationships.
Molly Melching worked as a translator bridging between communities in Senegal, Africa. What she sees, and I can relate to that as a translator myself, is that there is more than language dividing groups, there is an empathy barrier.
Molly says the empathy barrier ruins everything in development. People get outraged by some practices, rush in and say 'This is harmful, stop it!' but this is the wrong approach. Outrage may save a girl or two, empathy could change the system. For example, she created an organisation called Tostan tackling female genital mutilation, a very hard subject. She does not use the word mutilation, but the word cutting because it is less offending. Her approach is not to judge from the outside but to discuss from the inside with people fluent in local languages, hold multi-faceted community meetings regularly and for a long period of times around such issues. They start talking about an ideal future for their community and the rights of everyone, like a right to better health, how can we achieve that?
What is progress? Conversations accelerate change when the people who are talking together are getting better - 'I don't mean human beings getting better at science and technology, I mean people getting better at being human beings', she says. The gains in rights for women, people of colour, LGBT and other groups historically discriminated are signs of human progress. And the starting point for human improvement is empathy. Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That is how we work towards a shared knowledge.
When people can't agree, it is often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared knowledge or experience. If you can feel what others feel, you are more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand them, and you can move to an honest and respectful exchange of ideas that is the mark of a successful partnership. Empathy is the source of progress.
Collective intelligence - a 2010 academic study mentioned in her book says that the collective intelligence of a workgroup is correlated to three factors: the average social sensibility of the average group members, the group's ability to take turn contributing, and the proportion of females in the group. "Groups that included one woman at least outperformed all-male groups in collective intelligence tests, and group intelligence was more strongly correlated to gender diversity than to the IQs of the individual team members" (p.229). Gender equality is not just good for women, it is good for anyone who wants good results.
The power of many - there is an example in the book about sex workers being abused in police stations in India for carrying condoms with them (the condoms prove that they were sex workers but at the same time, it is ruining HIV prevention work since the sex workers won't carry them for this reason and the risk of beating/violence associated), and how a simple text message sent to a group of 10 people ready to storm off to the police station to support the victim could change things. This was implemented through technology. It worked. The underlying reason she brings up is "Every man who is a bully is scared of a group of women."
What feeds the cycle of war? When women are wounded, they often manage to absorb their pain without passing it on. They know they can go to their sisters and they cry together if needed, and together they can find their voice with one another. But when the man are wounded, they need to make someone pay. That is what feeds the cycle of war. The success in social movement is about taking pain without passing it on. Anyone who can combine the two finds a voice with a moral force. The voice is buried underneath the grief, there can't be a voice if only the grief is reachable. Why do people who can't take pain without passing it on have such a loud voice? There is a difference between a loud voice and a strong one. A man who has no inner life and who is a stranger to his own grief is never a voice of justice, it's a voice of self-interest, dominance, and vengeance. Strong male voice for freedom and dignity come from people like Mandela who once was asked if he was still angry at his captors after he was released from prison. He said yes, he was at times, but he realised that if he stayed angry, he would still be a prisoner - and he wanted to be free. There is a part of acceptance of the pain so that the voice can be found beneath the pain and be free. This is a counter-intuitive concept, but a powerful one.
And much more, …. definitely a book to read and recommend.
