Melinda Gates "The moment of lift". Quotes
✔️In fact, the first time I was asked if I was a feminist, I didn't know what to say because I didn't think of myself as a feminist. I'm not sure I knew then what a feminist was. That was when our daughter Jenn was a little less than a year old. Twenty-two years later, I am an ardent feminist. To me, it's very simple. 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.
This isn't something I could have said with total conviction even ten years ago. It came to me only after many years of listening to women - often women in extreme hardship whose stories taught me what leads to inequity and how human beings flourish.
✔️ Breaking article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times about diarrhea causing milions of childhood deaths in developing countries. Everything we heard and read had the same theme: Children in poor countries were dying trom conditions that no kids died from in the United States.
Sometimes new facts and insights don't register until you hear them from several sources, and then everything starts coming together. As we kept reading about children who were dying whose lives could be saved, Bill and I began to think, Maybe we can do something about this.
The most bewildering thing to us was how little attention this got. In his speeches, Bill used the example of a plane crash. If a plane crashes, three hundred people die, and it's tragic for the families, and there's an article in every newspaper. But on the same day, thirty thousand children die, and that's tragic for the families, and there's no article in any newspaper. We didn't know about these children's deaths because they were happening in poor countries, and what's happening in poor countries doesn't get much attention in rich countries. That was the biggest shock to my conscience: Millions of Children were dying because they were poor, and we weren't hearing about it because they were poor.
✔️ And my own mother had a powerful influence on my choice, though she might not have known it. She always said to me as I was growing up, "If you don't set your own agenda, somebody else will." If I didn't fill my schedule with things I felt were important, other people would fill my schedule with things they felt were important.
✔️My huge missed idea. If you want to lift up humanity, empower women.
✔️ Nearly 750 million people are living in extreme poverty now, down from 1.85 billion people in 1990. According to the policy-makers, people in extreme poverty are those living on the equivalent of $1.90 a day. But those numbers don't capture the desperation of their lives. What extreme poverty really means is that no matter how hard you work, you're trapped. You can't get out. Your efforts barely matter. You've been left behind by those who could lift you up. That's what Hans helped me understand. Over the course of our friendship, he would always say, "Melinda, you have to be about the people on the margins."
✔️ Vishwajeet told me, Their cup is not empty; you can't just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup. If you don't understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community's practices, you won't present your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won't hear you.
✔️The lift that comes from sending girls like Sona to school is stunning-for the girls, their families, and their communities. When you send a girl to school, the good deed never dies. It goes on for generations advancing advancing every public good, from health to economic gain to gender equity and national prosperity. Here are just a few of the things we know from the research.
Sending girls to school leads to greater literacy, higher wages, faster income growth, and more productive farming. It reduces premarital sex, lowers the chance of early marriage, delays first births, and helps mothers plan how many children to have and when. Mothers who have had an education do a better job learning about nutrition, vaccination and other behaviors necessary for raising healthy children.
✔️ All the women I have talked to and all the data I have seen, convinced me that the most transforming force of education for women and girls is changing the self image of the girl who goes to school. This is a secret of an empowering education: a girl learns she’s not who she’s been told she is. She is the equal of anyone and she has rights she needs to assert and defend.
✔️ This is reality for millions of women, especially in poorer countries, where women do a much higher share of the unpaid work that makes a household run. On average, women around the world spend more than twice as many hours on unpaid work, but the range of new the disparity is wide. In India, women spend 6 hours a day doing unpaid work, while men spend less than 1. In the US, women average more than 4 hours of unpaid work every day; men average just 2.5. In Norway, women spend 3.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men spend about 3. There is no country where the gap is zero. This means that, on average, women do seven years more of unPaid work than men over their lifetimes. That's about the time it takes to complete a bachelor's and a master's degree. When women reduce the time they spend on unpaid work, they increase the time they spend on paid work. In fact, unpaid work cutting women's unpaid work from five hours a day to three boosts women's participation in the labor force by about 20 percent. That is hugely significant because it is paid work that elevates women toward equality with men and gives them power and independence.
✔️ It's true that women are natural caregivers and capable homemakers. But so are men. When women take on those duties exclusively, men's abilities are never developed in other roles. When men develop their nurturing side, it doubles the number of capable caregivers. It helps men build strong bonds with their children that bring joy and last a lifetime. And it helps both men and women develop a wider range of their abilities. Even better, the shift improves the relationships between men and women by diminishing male dominance. Anytime you have a category of tasks that's considered "women's work" that men will not share, it reinforces a false hierarchy that prevents men and women from doing productive work together. Breaking that hierarchy actually leads to men's empowerment, because it allows men to discover the power of partnership and lets them develop the caring side.
✔️ Farming is not the only area of the economy that is stunted by gender bias. Recent reports from the World Bank show that gender discrimination is encoded in law nearly everywhere in the world.
In Russia, there are 456 jobs women cannot perform because they're deemed too strenuous or dangerous. Women there can’t become carpenters, professional divers, or ship captains, to name just a few positions. One hundred and four countries have laws that put certain jobs off-limits for women.
In Yemen, a woman can't leave the house without her husband's permission. Seventeen countries have laws that limit when and how
women can travel outside the home.
In Liberia, if a woman’s husband dies, she has no right to her family’s assets. She herself is considered part of his property - and as people in some rural communities will explain “property cannot own property”.
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Finally, discrimination against women is perpetuated not only in laws that exclude women but also in the absence of laws that support Women. In the United States, there is no law ensuring paid maternity leave for new mothers. Worldwide, there are seven countries wnere women are not guaranteed paid maternity leave. The ideal, of course, would be paid leave for any major family health situation,
including parental leave for new dads. But the lack of paid maternity leave and paid parental leave is an embarrassing sign of a society that does not value families and does not listen to women.
✔️ My own church’s ban on modern contraceptives is just a small effect of a larger issue: it’s ban on women priests. There is no chance that a church that included women priests - and bishops and cardinals and popes - would ever issue the current rule banning contraceptives. Empathy would forbid it.
✔️ I was the group product unit manager for Microsoft Bob. (You don't remember Microsoft Bob?!) We hoped it would make Windows more user-friendly. It was a flop. The tech critics killed it.
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But you just can't put a value on what you learn when you stand up as the face of a project that failed. (There was a joke in the company that you didn't get promoted until you had your first bigfailure. Not entirely true, but useful solace in difficult times.)
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Mercifully, most of my other failures weren't as public as this one, or as painful. But all those failures were useful.
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Nothing sharpens my focus like a mistake.
✔️ It is frustrating to me that women are still facing hostile cultures in many fields today, and I am especially upset that this issues are keeping women out of the tech industry. These are such exciting jobs. They are fun. They are innovative. They pay well. They have a growing impact on our future, and there are more of them every year. But it’s more than that. Tech is the most powerful industry in the world. It’s creating the ways we will live our lives. If women are not in tech, women will not have power. The percentage of computing graduates who are women has plunged since I was in college. When I graduated from Duke in 1987 35% of computing graduates in the United States were women. Today it’s 19%.
✔️ Only 2 percent of venture capital partners are women, and only 2 percent of venture capital money is going to women-founded ventures. (The amount of venture capital that goes to firms founded by African American women is 0.2 percent.) Nobody can think this makes economic sense. Women are going to have a ton of great business ideas that men are never going to think of. Unfortunately, "Who will have the most exciting business ideas?” is not the question driving the decisions.
When you're funding start-ups, there is so little data on what works in early-stage investing that the funders give money to the people they know - guys who went to the same schools and go to the same conferences. It's an old-boys club with younger boys.
✔️Gender and racial diversity is essential for healthy society. When one group marginalizes others and decides on its own what will be pursued and prioritized, it’s decisions will reflect its values, its mindsets, and its blind spots.
✔️ “If you live near the crossroads or if you live near a river, you’re going to be OK. But if you live on the margins the world is going to forget about you”. The map Hans (Rosling) drew that day showed the geography of poverty. Extremely poor live far away from the flow of travel and trade that connects people to each other.