“The Moment of Lift” by Melinda Gates
While “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World” (2019) focuses primarily on philanthropy aimed at helping poor women and families, it contains many valuable lessons for women leaders everywhere, including in academia and tech.
By Patricia A. Maurice and Janet G. Hering
20 August 2024, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13234353
Melinda French Gates (here MFG) earned an undergraduate degree in computer science and an MBA at Duke. She began her career as a product manager at Microsoft, married founder Bill Gates, quit work to raise three children, and transformed into a philanthropist who focuses much of her efforts on empowering women and fostering gender equity. Her STEMM education informs her philanthropic work, perhaps most obviously through her focus on data and science. She also knows what it's like to be a woman in a male-dominated world. Her more recent divorce, departure as co-director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and focus on her own philanthropic and development work are not covered in this text.
It is well worth reading “The Moment of Lift” as Janet did or listening to MFG reading it out loud, as Patricia did, for the many poignant stories she tells about women in extreme poverty throughout the world [1]. These stories remind us that the problems we face as senior women leaders in STEMM are absolutely nothing compared to the incredibly severe challenges facing our far less fortunate, less privileged sisters. We are also reminded that some of the challenges that women in STEMM face simply reflect the way the world has always been for women. The book is a study of how a woman can find her voice and become a leader, even if at first reluctantly. We highly recommend the book because the stories are eye-opening, and the author’s many observations and reflections are timeless and powerful.
In this post, we highlight some key points from several chapters in “The Moment of Lift” that we found particularly relevant for senior women leaders in STEMM. The book also includes a chapter “Creating a New Culture: Women in the Workplace” that draws heavily on MFG’s own experience at Microsoft and offers inspiration and ideas for academia as well as the tech industry. We especially recommend reading this chapter for MFG’s reflections on her female role models and mentors.
Identifying as a feminist
MFG writes that, years ago, she wasn’t sure what a feminist was, but she now feels that “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.” Feminism is not about doctrine but about a commitment to encouraging women to flourish and grow.
As part of a later discussion of the importance of family planning, MFG writes “I’ve come to learn that stigma is always an effort to suppress someone’s voice. It forces people to hide in shame. The best way to fight back is to speak up – to say openly the very thing that others stigmatize. It’s a direct attack on the self-censorship that stigma needs to survive.” As we and many other women have noted, there is often stigma associated with being a feminist. We thank MFG for having the courage to call herself an ‘ardent feminist,’ thereby helping to erode the stigma.
Lifting women lifts everyone
“The Moment of Lift” is deeply informed by the recognition that everyone benefits from the inclusion of excluded groups. Excluding women, in particular, deprives society of the benefits of full participation of half its members. It also reflects the dominant position of “men who have a need to exclude.” MFG concludes “If you want to lift up humanity, empower women.” In our post “It’s Not Pie”, we also discussed how equity for women in STEMM can benefit everyone [2], echoing MFG’s comment that “Gender diversity is not just good for women; it’s good for anyone who wants results”.
Education improves lives
An entire chapter is devoted to the impact of education on girls’ lives highlighting that “more than almost anything else society and government provide, education determines who thrives. Education is a vital step on the path to empowerment for women…”. Girls who stay in school can delay marriage and childbearing. With better education, women can communicate more effectively with medical professionals, teach their children, and sometimes even have a job that can directly contribute to a family’s finances. Education lifts a woman’s spirit by lifting her self-worth.
We are convinced that it is important for young women and men who attend universities to encounter successful female faculty. At the same time, we are concerned about PhD programs that tend to focus on academic careers even though there are very few openings each year [3]. Many women in academia end up in lower paying non-tenure track positions. Although gains have been made in breaking the glass ceiling, there have been recent attacks on senior women leaders both in the US (including the recent cases of the U. Penn. and Harvard presidents) and in Europe as we discussed in a previous post [4]. Women in STEMM should be able to put their PhDs to use in academia, industry, or government, both for their own advancement and for the benefit of society.
Male allies
In this blog series, we have written a post on the importance of male allies [5] and have profiled two male colleagues whose allyship was personally important for us [6, 7]. MFG illustrates that “women need male allies” with examples from her personal life, her time at Microsoft, and her philanthropic work. Her father was an aerospace engineer who made a concerted effort to hire women and who encouraged his daughters to study math and computer science. MFG considered leaving Microsoft because of the hypercompetitive culture, but she was able to find some like-minded women and male allies. From her philanthropic work, MFG discusses how having just one male ally can be transformational. “The process of changing from a male-dominated culture to a culture of gender equality must be supported by a majority of community members, including powerful men who come to understand that sharing power with women allows them to achieve goals they couldn’t achieve if they relied on their power alone.” She illustrates this with a story of how an African Imam was convinced to help transform the culture of some neighboring villages to end traditions that caused women great pain and suffering, resulting in better lives for everyone.
The power of a group of women
In many societies, women are marginalized and isolated, and this isolation saps their power. The book presents many examples of women gaining power when they meet, talk, and band together. As MFG writes, “I was seeing women lifting each other up. And I saw that it all begins when women start talking to each other.” She quotes a colleague as saying “Every man who’s a bully is scared of a group of women.” As women in STEMM, we experienced isolation, especially as we rose through the ranks and became senior women leaders. As we wrote in our first post, the power of women communicating with one another and helping one another was a key motivation for our blog series [8].
Effecting change in male-dominated environments
Few of MFG’s comments are so readily applicable to STEMM and academia as the following: “A man who is dominant is probably not going to say, ‘hey let’s be equal. Take some of my power’.” As we have written previously [2, 5], women in STEMM need to work together and with male allies so that we can demonstrate the benefits of women’s power and “become partners with men in ending hierarchy.” It is our hope that greater inclusion of women in STEMM academics, particularly in leadership positions, will lead to a more humane working environment that is compatible with caring responsibilities outside work and rewards work that is done (mainly by women [9]) with little or no compensation both in and outside the workplace. But, as Alison Vogelaar pointed out in her guest post, women (as well as men) can perpetuate harmful workplace norms and behaviors, up to an including discrimination and harassment [10].
Setting your own agenda
MFG quoted her mother as saying, “If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will.” MFG realized that “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.” In academia, it’s easy to let your calendar be filled with meetings and events that other people have scheduled. If you want to lead, you need to take control of your time and agenda.
Senior women leaders who set their own agenda are likely to be disruptive. If academic workplaces are to become supportive environments for everyone, alpha-male cultures and hierarchies will need to be replaced.
Traditional academic practices, particularly regarding evaluations, tenure, and promotion, were developed by and for white men; we believe that senior women have not just a right but a responsibility to question them. MFG writes that “Traditions without discussions kills moral progress. If you’re handed a tradition and decide not to talk about it – just do it – then you’re letting people from the past tell you what to do.” Challenging traditions takes courage, but as Carla Koretsky demonstrated in her post, senior woman leaders have the courage it takes [11].
Concluding comments and questions for further thought
In “The Moment of Lift” Melinda French Gates shares her passion for loving one’s neighbors by leading in efforts to improve the lives of the most marginalized, and that often starts with lifting up women and girls. In the Epilogue of the Audiobook, she states that “Love is the most powerful and under-used force for change in the world.” MFG defines love as “the effort to help others flourish.” Good leadership is all about helping others to flourish. As senior women leaders, we found her book to be inspirational and thought-provoking.
Here are some questions to continue the discussion:
· Have you read “The Moment of Lift”? If so, what lessons did you glean from it?
· Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?
· How can we transform the workplace so that women, indeed everyone, in STEMM can flourish and do their best work?
References and Notes
[1] Gates, M. (2019) The Moment of Lift: Empowering Women Changes the World, Bluebird (UK edition), 273 pp.
[3] Hering, J.G. (2023) “Pipelines are not meant for people” Strukturelle, https://www.strukturelle.ch/en/post/pipelines-are-not-meant-for-people
[6] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/allies-for-women-leaders-in-stemm-thoughts-from-an-unabashed-optimist
[8] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/a-little-less
[9] Guarino, C.M. and Borden, V.M.H. (2017) “Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?” Research in Higher Education, https://case.edu/ideal-n/sites/default/files/2018-04/Guarino_Faculty_Service_Loads%20_and_Gender.pdf (accessed June 23, 2024)
[10] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/gender-and-bullying-in-the-academic-workplace