Giving Compass' Take:

•  Kathleen D. McCarthy reviews Melinda Gates' book: The Moment of Lift, and discusses central themes relating to women in the workplace, investing in women and girls, and the general need for more female empowerment.

• How will these themes resonate with female donors? How does her mantra of "partnerships over patriarchy" impact the way donors might think about collaboration? 

• Learn more about the central ideas in The Moment of Lift.

Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift, is a feminist Gospel of Wealth for the 21st century. While Andrew Carnegie’s much-cited 1889 essay, “Gospel of Wealth,” issued a clarion call to his fellow millionaires to build institutions such as universities and medical schools, Gates focuses instead on changing values. And while Carnegie used his gifts to institutionalize cadres of male managerial elites, Gates focuses on empowering women and girls to “crack the patterns of history.” As she explains, “When you lift up women, you lift up humanity” (2).

Her memoir-cum-manifesto is strung along a three-tier track. Part of it is cast in a highly personal, strikingly self-effacing idiom, detailing her quest to build a companionate marriage with her high-powered spouse, and her own campaign to have her voice and her priorities listened to.  Gates goes on to describe how her own career led her to fund technical education for girls in the U.S. and family planning overseas, and how gingerly she had to tread even within her own foundation to get people to listen to experts about the benefits of funding women and girls. Much of this material is deeply personal, sometimes almost discomfortingly so

A second track focuses on the need for women’s empowerment. In a book whose title—The Moment of Lift—nods to Gates’s father’s work for NASA and the moment when space rockets take off, Gates argues that supporting women provides the fuel to accelerate development and the push for social justice around the world, sparking a “moment of lift” for the entire population.

The book’s third track mixes the insights of female researchers, activists, and women in impoverished villages to show how NGOs that build on local women’s priorities have unleashed fundamental cultural shifts. Gates describes how her encounters with women in rural villages broadened her perspective from a narrow focus on family planning to more comprehensive initiatives including everything from educating girls to maternal and child health. In Gates’s telling, they are the true experts.

Read the full review of The Moment of Lift by Kathleen D. McCarthy at HistPhil.