THAT MOMENT OF LIFT
“Why does it sometimes take so long? And why does it sometimes happen so fast? What takes us past the tipping point when the forces pushing us up overpower the forces pulling us down and we’re lifted from the earth and begin to fly?”
Melinda Gates wrote this in a literal reference to planes taking off, but those words resonated with me in terms of “when’s my turn?” wistfulness about my unrealised hopes, dreams and master plans. And then I almost immediately felt incredibly selfish, because a paragraph down in the introduction of her book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, Gates continues:
“How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings – and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. And how can we create a moment of lift in human hearts so that we all want to lift up women? Because sometimes all that’s needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down.”
Just as gravity that acts on a 500-tonne mass gives over to a greater aerodynamic force that lifts a plane, societal forces of change can raise the quality of life – even the very chance of survival itself – of hundreds of millions of impoverished women and children, and lift them from the near-hopelessness of their realities. Gates, wife to Bill the billionaire and co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has not just been writing cheques from afar, but has also often been on the ground in developing countries these past 20 years to really learn first-hand what women need for health and safety, and to break the poverty cycle. Contraceptives, medicine, midwives and doctors can be funded; changing a low self-image and misogynism is a long game.
I’m just midway into chapter four, highlighting and rereading along the way, and I’m itching to take half a day’s leave to finish the book that I started on this weekend (friend who recommended it: “Can’t put it down. She’s awesome!”). Unable to resist, I skipped ahead to chapter eight where Gates, one of the early women in tech (this was some 30 years ago) talks about creating her own culture in Microsoft and a safe space for women – and men – to thrive, instead of trying to fit in with the brashness back then of the male-dominated company culture.
Representing a still-minority of women in tech today, Ankiti Bose has created a near-billion-dollar business that levels the playing field for small businesses and women. Recognising in the course of her daily interactions that women, even her own staff, have “an internalised misogyny that causes us to automatically devalue ourselves”, Ankiti is coaxing them to break out. “You would be shocked at how many women undervalue themselves. For most of the women in my company, I have to convince them to ask for a bigger raise. Women are just so happy every time they get whatever they get. But you are worth so much more. I tell them, ‘Ask for what you’re worth and then fight with me for it.’”
I love it. Tell me what you think! Grace Tay | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF grace.tay@burda.com.sg