One of my favorite spiritual writers Mark Nepo
has this phrase "moment of lift" in one of his books,
and it's that moment of grace, you know,
when you're having a conversation with somebody
and you don't really kinda know what it's going to be about
or even maybe a hard conversation,
then you get this moment of grace
that just sort of lifts things up and elevates it
and you're able to have an opening for a hard topic.
I'm about to be sitting down and talking with...
- Melinda Gates. - About her book "The Moment of Lift."
- I'm Kind of fangirling right now. - There's empirical fact
that she has saved hundreds of millions of lives.
So ready for this conversation.
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- Here. Come on. - Hello.
- Hi. - Nice to see you again.
"Booktube," it's such a vibrant community here of folks
who come together on YouTube who really, really love reading
and we love books and we really love learning,
so it is very exciting to be here
to get to talk about your book "The Moment of Lift."
So, firstly, thank you for writing it.
- Thanks, Uzo. - Secondly, this title is so powerful.
Where did the title come from and what does it mean to you?
It's sort of has two meanings as I write about it in the book.
One is that my father worked on the space launches,
the first Apollo mission, and when I was a little girl in my jammies,
it was like the only time my sister and I could stay up late.
We'd drive across town to his friend's place
who'd worked on the Apollo missions.
And we would wait and wait and wait for that rocket to take off.
And I titled my book because, you know, that moment when the engines are igniting...
man: Two, one.
...and the earth is starting to rumble,
but then finally the rocket picks up against gravity
- and goes to the moon. - man: Liftoff. We have a liftoff.
Melinda:
But as I wrote this book, I started thinking about all the things
that hold women down, that gravitational pull,
and how do we come together to get the lift
off of the earth and off of these issues for women.
Lift us all up.
What inspired you to write this book?
Like, why is this "The Moment of Lift"?
I'd been thinking about writing this book for a little while,
for three or four years.
But it just seemed like this was the right time.
We have this opening that's been created by so much conversation,
but really by the Me Too movement that went worldwide really quickly.
And we need to take advantage of that window while it's open
because otherwise it will close,
and we won't actually lift women up.
So it felt urgent for me to do it and do it now.
Hey, I'm Ingrid, and my YouTube channel is IngridNilson.
Today I'm going to be talking about the books that have completely changed my life.
I know that I am the woman that I am today because of so many books.
Especially books written by women.
( music playing )
Advice to men watching at home.
- Support your partner. - Your current read.
Nelson Mandela's "Long Walk To Freedom."
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a businesswoman when I grew up,
and I wanted to work in technology.
Check. And the last one, advice to women at home watching.
Be whoever you want to be.
I wanted to know how do you stay off on tech
because I know that that's a battle for many women.
Yeah, and I talk about it in the book.
I think I had-- not think, I know.
I had lots and lots and lots of doubt for many, many years.
Am I credible? Do I know enough?
Do I-- you know, I'm working at Microsoft. Do I have the technical chops?
I have a computer science degree. Of course I do.
I think society, if you work in pretty male environments
or just messages society gives women over and over again,
it tells us you can't have that role.
You don't see anybody like you up there,
so you must not be good enough, you know?
- Mm-hmm. - So we have to fight against that as women.
And we need to help pull up the young women.
You all do, too, who are even younger than you
as they start to rise and come out into the workforce.
You have an example in the book of when you were starting your career
deciding to work at IBM or at Microsoft.
And I just thought that moment was so interesting.
Very much like where did the legend begin?
Yeah, so it was the last year of my MBA program,
and I had had some summer internships for IBM.
They made me a job offer, and I said, "Look,
I am gonna look at other places and then I'll come let you know
late spring of my MBA year whether I'm gonna take this job."
And so I turned down all my other offers,
but I still had this callback from Microsoft to go do.
So I cam home on spring break, went through Dallas,
which was where my hiring manager was. I grew up in Dallas.
And she said, "Are you ready to accept the offer with IBM?"
And I said, "Actually, I have just one more company. A little company, Microsoft."
They'd just gone public in Seattle.
And she said, "Do you want a piece of advice?"
And I said, "Sure."
And she said, "Well, if they make you a job offer,
you should take it." And she floored me.
This is my hiring manager. And I said, "Why?"
And she said, "Well, because your chance as a woman to advance would be meteoric."
And so it sticks in my mind because we woman have to be for other women, right?
- Yeah. Yeah. - I mean, I see these young men graduating from college
are going out in the community and there's just these built-in networks...
- Mm-hmm. - ...that lift them up and take them off and offer them jobs.
- Right. - And so how do we open our networks
and how do we be for everyone else?
That was a fabulous piece of advice.
And then I went to Microsoft for my interview.
The salary they offered me was so much lower than the rest of MBA school.
And I said, "Look, I don't care.
- I love what this company is doing. - Right.
Now I happened to also get some stock options
that I didn't think would be worth anything, but they were.
But I loved what they were doing.
They were changing the world, and that resonated with me.
man: What can we expect over the next few years?
A machine on every desk top.
- The idea of a little Microsoft. - I know.
Right? Taking a chance on Microsoft.
It was less than 1,400 employees when I started.
- Right. - It was tiny. We were in four little buildings
outside of Seattle.
Hey, I'm Ariel from the channel Ariel Bissett, and I love books.
For as long as I've understood what feminism means,
I have identified as a feminist.
I think it's so wonderful when authors are able to highlight other voices.
And Melinda Gates did such a great job of tying that back to her own experiences.
I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive
into one of the issues that really made me think a lot.
- Mm. - You talk a lot about technology.
We all have a phone in our pocket.
So many of us are on social media.
How can we use social media to empower women?
Well, I think we can all use our social media channels
to talk about the issues about women that we truly see in our lives
- and that we know that matter. - Mm.
So, for instance, if you care about paid family medical leave,
which the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world
that doesn't have it, if you care about that issue,
you can amplify it, you can talk about it.
And then you can also email your senator's office in your state and say,
"I want this passed for men and women in my state."
I think that we have to look at the barriers that hold women down.
And in the workplace, it's often discrimination or sexual harassment.
- Mm-hmm. - We know a woman, if she's harassed in her job,
she leaves at an 80% rate within the next two years.
So we wonder why women don't rise to the top.
So many have been harassed in one way or another.
They don't stay long enough.
They move 'cause they don't want to stay in that environment.
So we have to look at things in the workplace like that.
We have to look at equal pay, leadership roles in the workplace,
and then we have to also look both in the developed world
and the developing world at this unpaid work
that women do every single day.
Yes, women do 90 minutes more of unpaid work
than their husband does every single day.
And in countries like India, there's an enormous gap.
A woman does five hours more a day of unpaid work compared to her husband.
- That is enormous. - Yes.
And so over the course, the average of women's lives around the world,
it averages out to about seven years.
Seven years of a woman's life unpaid work.
I recently learned that, you know, women who are breastfeeding
are spending, like, eight hours of time a day breastfeeding.
- Oh, it's so hard. It takes so long. - People assume that it's free.
- I know. - That's time. That's valuable time.
Yeah, no, it's valuable time.
And we don't even talk about how hard it is for women.
Most women are working now.
And in married couples, the greater majority are working.
And so we have to rethink the work environment.
It has to be okay for the mom or the dad
to go pick up the kid when they're sick from school
or take them to the doctor when they need it.
You discuss in your book about a moment where
- Bill ends up driving your kids to school. - Mm-hmm.
And I wanted to know any more stories that you may have
that creates more inclusion in a marriage.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the conversations
we've had in our household is even about, like,
who's gonna clean up after dinner?
Who's gonna do the dishes? Right?
After dinner, somebody's gotta do the dishes.
Luckily, Bill grew up in a family
where he and his sister did them side by side,
as I did with my sister, so that was easy for him.
But one night the three kids and we were doing the dishes,
cleaning up the table, et cetera, getting everything in the dishwasher.
And then I realized why is it, like, everybody would wander way upstairs.
Maybe the kids sit and listen to music, you know.
Bill would go do whatever on his computer.
And I'm like, why am I still down here doing the last five, eight minutes of stuff?
So one night-- I'm not always kind about things,
I have to be honest, when I'm frustrated.
So in a moment of myself, I put my hands on my hips, I'm like--
They all started to wander, I go, "Nobody leaves this kitchen
- till I leave the kitchen." - Mm-hmm.
And guess what? All the jobs got done in about three minutes.
- Really fast. - ( overlapping chatter )
And they all figure out what still has to be done.
It's like they sorta don't see it, you know?
And I went, like, "Yeah, you see what needs to be done."
Hi, my name is Sasha Alsberg, and I run the channel Abookutopia.
I'm actually working on a book,
and it's actually going quite well. ( vocalizing )
I've written three books to date,
two of them hit number one on the "New York Times" list,
which is super exciting.
I was wondering if you could read the last sentence of your book
- that I have right here. - Sure.
I love how you had the book title in the last sentence.
- Mm. - What was the inspiration of leaving your reader
with that last line?
Anna touched my life. She lived in Tanzania.
And following her around for two days and the many, many, many conversations,
she touched me and opened me in a way about women all over the world,
including the United States and what we need to do.
You give voice to so many different women around the world,
but there's so many difficult stories.
For me, it was especially the chapter on child marriage
- where I was just like, "Ah, this is so brutal to read." - Melinda: It's hard.
But at the end of this book, I left it feeling optimistic.
So I want to ask you, like, where does that optimism come from?
I've been lucky enough now to have traveled for 20 years through the Foundation.
And so often I do come out of a country with, like, "Oh, my gosh.
I saw, you know, four really hard things in the last couple of days.
But if you look at large at the statistics,
the world is getting better for women.
It is getting better overall.
It's moving and it's improving in the right direction,
but we are not yet still to a place of equality.
- Right. - How can we be active in speeding up the progress
to the astounding number of 208 years...
- Yeah. Yeah. - ...before we reach true equality?
Isn't that crazy?
( music playing )
It just is this eye-opener. It's this, you know,
it's this damning, it's this daunting figure.
For the U.S., we are 208 years.
And you just say, you know, that's my granddaughter's granddaughter's generation.
- Mm-hmm. - Right? I think we have to all take this up.
We have to look in our homes, you know,
and ask for more equality in our homes if we don't feel we have it.
- Yeah. - We have to look in our workplaces
and say, "Okay, what are we actually doing
to sponsor and mentor women?
How are we giving women pathways into these really important careers in society?
- Mm-hmm. - And we have to look in our communities and say,
"Okay, are the right people setting policies,
and if not, who should be running for that office,
and how do I go out and volunteer for them or run myself?"
- Right. - And then I would say for the developing world,
I list about nine organizations in the back of the book.
They are doing incredible work on child marriage
or other issues that I mention in the book.
They're very credible places who do great work.
For me, one of the craziest moments was when Warren Buffett,
like, donated that huge amount of money,
and you had that moment where you were like,
- "How can I maximize this?" - Totally.
"How can I use this to save the most amount of lives?"
- Yeah. It's crazy. - Yeah.
I mean, think about it. If you were spending, you know,
$500 of your own money on an organization.
But then somebody you know gave you 500 and said,
"Okay, now you allocate this where you think it will be best used."
- Yeah. - It's this, like, huge responsibility,
- right? You know? - Yeah.
( music playing )
Part of the reason I went so deeply after this women's work
was we were ignoring it as a foundation.
We really weren't looking at it systematically.
And we kept thinking we would have these effects with our work.
You know, vaccines, new seeds.
But the truth was we weren't reaching the women.
We were often reaching men, but if we didn't look at the women's issues,
they weren't getting-- most of them were farmers.
They weren't getting that new seed
that deals with climate change.
That's pest-resistant or drought-resistant.
So we have to look at these women's issues.
And so, in a way, Warren's money has been
kind of a guiding light for me and, like,
okay, we have to go after this really hard work
because it's how we will use all of our dollars really effectively.
- Right. - And you've also experienced what it's like
to not receive support. I remember reading in your book
about the official Vatican newspaper condemning your work in family planning.
Melinda: Yeah.
And you grew up Catholic and, you know,
something that really struck me is when you said two days later,
"I understood why they said what they said, but I didn't agree with it."
- Melinda:
that you don't agree with?
We have to look for the common ground, and you first have to say,
"Does this person or this organization,
do we essentially at the core share the same values."
And I do think the Catholic Church,
Catholic and social justice mission,
they do care about the poor.
When I look at the statistics between low and middle income countries
or middle and high income, to be honest,
when women finally have voluntary access to birth control,
- Uzo: Um-hmm. - Communities-- literally, countries start to rise.
Because then women can get educated and they can enter the workforce.
So we have to say where do we share common values,
and then how do we move forward together?
What is the biggest thing you want for people to take away?
Both from "The Moment of Lift" and then, you know,
your advocacy work around the world outside of the book.
You live this is the point.
I want people to take away that this is possible.
It's not inevitable that women will rise and get equality,
- but it's totally possible. - Mm.
And we all have something to add to help one another
and to help women rise.
Well, and that's what makes a book like "The Moment of Lift" important.
And I really do think people picking it up really start to understand
the importance of supporting and empowering women.
I think a book club like this is so powerful sitting around
and enjoying a conversation about this book,
so thank you very, very much for coming.
Well, thanks for discussing with me.
This has been a lot of fun for me, too.
I love hearing what resonated for you, so thanks.
woman: Yeah, you activate.
Activate! Go!
- Can we go party now? - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Oh! Oh!
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( baby giggling )