The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Chapters 4-6 address three key issues that restrict girls and women: a lack of education, the unequal distribution of unpaid work, and child marriage. Gender inequality underlies all three issues. Studies prove that education has a transformative impact on girls and women, its positive effects even extending to entire communities. Girls who study not only bear healthier children but pass down benefits to said children: “mothers who have gone to school are more than twice as likely to send their own children to school” (93). Despite clear evidence showing the benefits of girls’ education, 130 million girls around the world do not attend school. By contrast, boys are educated at much higher rates:

In Guinea, just one in four girls is enrolled in secondary school, while almost 40 percent of boys are. In Chad, fewer than a third of girls are enrolled in secondary school, but more than two out of three boys are. In Afghanistan, too, just over a third of girls are enrolled in secondary school, compared to nearly 70 percent of boys. These barriers continue in university. In low-income countries, for every hundred boys who continue their education after high school, only fifty-five girls do the same (100).

Governments around the world fought—and continue to fight—to make school more accessible to girls and women. This generally involves removing financial barriers. The government of Mexico, for example, spearheaded the “Oportunidades” program, which treated education like a job by paying families to send their children to school; payments were based on students’ earning potential (i.e., elementary children might earn a monthly salary of $10, while high school students might make $60). Girls received more money than boys, giving parents extra incentive to enroll their daughters. Statistics show that the program worked: “Girls who were in Oportunidades had a 20 percent greater chance of being in school than girls who weren’t. Not only did more girls go to school, but those who did stayed in school longer” (103). Mexico reached gender parity in primary, secondary, and college education just 20 years after launching Oportunidades—the program being so successful that 52 countries adopted it.

The BRAC program in Bangladesh also invested in girls’ education, yielding results comparable to those of Oportunidades. The Liberation War of 1971 left many families struggling to survive on small plots of land; girls and women did the brunt of agricultural work and household chores. Consequently, under 2% of girls attended school by the fifth grade. BRAC schools sought to address gender inequality in education by stipulating that girls make up at least 70% of the student body. Rather than incentivize with salaries, BRAC schools provided books and classroom materials free of charge. They planned around the growing season to mitigate the loss of girls’ labor as well.

Programs to educate girls are often met with opposition because they threaten the traditional view that women are duty-bound to serve men. In Bangladesh, religious extremists burned down BRAC schools to keep girls at home—but they proved no match as BRAC leaders continued their efforts in rebuilt schools. The country now boasts more girls in high school than boys, and BRAC runs nearly 50,000 schools and learning centers worldwide.

Malala Yousafzai is arguably the most well-known advocate for girls’ education—and exemplifies how much an individual can do for a cause. Fifteen-year-old Yousafzai rose to prominence after being shot by a Taliban gunman on her way home from school. The shooting was not random—Yousafzai’s father was an educational activist at the time, and the family ran a chain of schools in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. Yousafzai spoke out against the Taliban on her blog for BBC Urdu and during interviews for national and international news outlets. The Taliban tried to silence the young woman, but only succeeded in giving her a platform.

Achieving gender equality demands addressing the unequal division of unpaid labor. Gates again relies on statistics to help readers better understand the issue. In India, for example, women spend approximately six hours per day working for free, while men only spend one hour doing the same. Even Norway, one of the most progressive countries in the world, has yet to reach this milestone: Norwegian women do three and a half hours of unpaid work per day, a half hour more than Norwegian men (117).

Gates cites the work of two economists to explain longstanding biases related to free labor. Marilyn Waring’s work opened people’s eyes to the unpaid labor burdening women around the world: “She calculated that if you hired workers at the market rate to do all the unpaid work women do, unpaid work would be the biggest sector of the global economy” (123). People pay for childcare, meals at restaurants, and utilities such as water; when women perform these tasks in their own homes, however, they do so for free. Before Waring, economists failed to count this labor as work; ending the systematic exploitation of said labor is an ongoing process. As Waring observed, “men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing […] Precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else” (124).

Building on Waring’s research, Diana Elson devised the framework of “recognize, reduce, and redistribute” to encourage gender parity in household tasks. Gates provides a personal example of this framework in motion: In 2001, her eldest daughter was to attend kindergarten, and the school was located 30-40 minutes away. When she shared her concerns with her husband, he offered to share the responsibility of taking their daughter to school. This not only helped Gates, but also impacted other couples. As one woman bluntly told her husband, if “‘Bill Gates is driving his child to school; you can, too’” (126).

Gates discusses her marriage to illustrate equal partnership. Both she and Bill Gates had to learn how to be equals, much of the process hinging on unpaid labor like driving their daughter to school. Because the couple co-runs their foundation, negotiating an equal partnership is crucial to their philanthropic work as well. They relied on open communication to operate at home and at the office. Their conversations made them mindful of each other’s strengths and weaknesses: “We’ve had to figure out who’s good at what and then make sure we each do more of that and not challenge each other too much on the things we’re not good at” (135). They resolved conflicts “through listening and respect” (135), never letting small disagreements become big ones.

As Gates notes, “nothing is further from equal partnership than child marriage. In all the ways that equal partnership is elevating, child marriage is degrading” (153). Child marriage does irreparable damage to girls, their families, and entire communities. Children lose important connections and opportunities for advancement when they’re married off; they spend the rest of their lives doing unpaid work for their husbands’ families. Once again, men benefit from this system, not girls and women—as the powerless appeal to potential suitors. Girls with ideas, skills, and strong voices do not make good servants.

Child marriage not only reinforces gender inequality but endangers the health and well-being of the girls involved. Many societies that practice child marriage also practice female genital-cutting. This practice takes different forms, ranging from partial removal of the clitoris to total removal of the clitoris and labia. Gates describes the most extreme form of female genital-cutting as “cutting off the clitoris but sewing the vagina shut so it can be reopened when the girl gets married” (157). Young girls are also not physiologically ready to bear children; some develop obstetric fistulas during childbirth (which often leads families to banish them). The most important preventative measure is delaying one’s first pregnancy, achievable with the abolition of child marriage.

Studies show that child brides who get pregnant have more children than those who delay their first pregnancy; these mothers don’t have time for jobs, which perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Child brides are also more likely to suffer abuse. According to a study conducted in several Indian states, girls who marry before 18 are twice as likely to be abused by their husbands than their unmarried peers (157). The age gap between a child bride and her husband is typically greater than that found among non-child brides, heightening the power imbalance in marriage.

Gates supports her argument against the practice of child marriage with a story—that of a Nigerian girl named Fati. Fati was married at 13 and got pregnant almost immediately. She was in labor for a long time without a skilled attendant. Three days later, Fati was taken to a clinic, where her infant died and she suffered an obstetric fistula. Like many of Gates’s anecdotes, the story of Fati puts a face to an otherwise clinical problem. Its purpose is to draw an emotional response, to play on reader’s empathy, and to motivate readers to speak out against child marriage.

Gates’s anecdotes not only rally readers to support various causes, but they also make her relatable. Before their divorce in August of 2021, Melinda and Bill Gates were the fourth richest people on the planet with a collective net worth of $124 billion (according to Forbes). However, Melinda Gates does not measure human value in terms of wealth: “Nobody is any better than anybody else, and no one’s happiness or human dignity matters more than anyone else’s” (119). This belief in human equality is at the core of her faith and philanthropic work. Gates’s actions very much align with her beliefs: In Chapter 5, she describes sleeping in a former goat hut and working alongside other women. This anecdote makes her relatable to fellow women who do a disproportionate amount of unpaid work. Her openness about her insecurities serves a similar function. Gates shares her discomfort giving speeches with her husband present. At the Convention Center in Seattle, she asked him to leave after his speech so that she didn’t have to speak in front of him: “Bill gave his remarks, discreetly left the hall, got in the car, drove around for fifteen minutes, came back, picked me up, and drove us home” (143). Bill Gates’s response to his wife’s needs was that of a supportive partner as he didn’t question her request or make her feel ashamed. In this regard, the anecdote also functions as an example for men who are learning to become supportive partners.