Reviews
Battling gender inequity to benefit all By Joyce Lehman THE MOMENT OF LIFT: How Empowering Women Changes the World By Melinda Gates (Flatiron Books, 273 pp., US$26.99) FROM RISK TO RESILIENCE: How Empowering Young Women Can Change Everything By Jenny Rae Armstrong (Herald Press, 2019, 206 pp., US$29.99)
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any international organizations design projects using a “gender lens” to intentionally benefit women over other groups. Experience has shown that empowering women strengthens the family, the community and the world. The life journey and ‘lens’ of the authors are very different. Readers may identify with one more than the other. But in the end, their final thoughts as to how this universal inequity should be addressed are remarkably similar. In The Moment of Lift, Melinda Gates offers a glimpse into her life before meeting her future husband. A whip-smart student at an all-girl Catholic high school in Dallas, she used her Duke University computer science degree to land a job at Microsoft, a smallish Seattle software company. Years later in 2000, she and her husband created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In the years since, she has increasingly become an international advocate for maternal and child health. The Foundation collects voluminous data on all its work, but for her, the best way to learn is by listening. Gates takes us with her as she hears
Books call everyone to support equality for young women the voices of women, many of whom are in extreme circumstances of poverty and abuse. For the daughter of a stay-athome mom and an aerospace engineer dad who worked on the Apollo program, space launches were big family moments. They joined other families to watch the drama, barely able to breath during the countdown to … Liftoff! Gates writes that for
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humanity, as with space shuttles, moments of lift happen when “the forces that push us up overpower the forces that pull us down.” The forces that pull humanity down create and sustain an abusive culture, one that singles out, excludes or diminishes a group. Such cultures are always less productive as energy is wasted on keeping people down rather than lifting them up. Gender discrimination is encoded in law in nearly every country in the world, Gates writes, including the US. She believes inequity increases when religions are dominated by men who distort the Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to serve their own purposes. These potent, millenniaold forces can only be overpowered when women gather together. Telling stories and sharing their grief creates a new culture built by their voices and values. Leymah Gbowee launched a women’s peace movement in Liberia that ultimately sent the President to prison for war crimes. Sex workers in India set up a speed dial network so others could come to their rescue when clients or police became violent. The stories are heart-breaking and uplifting. “Every man who’s a bully is afraid of a group of women,” she writes. Empowerment starts with getting together. That incites the courage to let women be seen and to ask for what they want or need, especially when no one wants them to have it. The Marketplace November December 2019
