The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Bill Gates is an American businessman and philanthropist. In 1975, he co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend, Paul Allen. In 2000, he co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation with his wife, donating stocks worth approximately $5 billion to the organization. As of 2007, he and his wife donated more than $28 billion to charity, making them the second-most generous philanthropists in the US (Wikipedia). Bill Gates works alongside Melinda Gates at the foundation, but the latter plays a more significant role in running it.

Melinda Gates describes Bill Gates as a supportive husband who encouraged her to pursue her career even after she took a step back to focus on raising children. Throughout their marriage, they forged an equal partnership. Bill Gates benefited from having a feminist father and strong women in his life, including his mother, who was the first woman to chair the National United Way’s executive committee. This upbringing and his love of challenges made equal partnership all the more appealing.

Hans Rosling (1948-2017) was a Swedish physician and international health professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, whose research appealed to Gates because it combined aid work with technology. In 2005, Dr. Rosling co-founded a non-profit organization called the Gapminder Foundation, which developed an information visualization software system that animates statistics—turning data into dynamic, interactive graphics. He rose to fame with provocative presentations that put data from the UN and World Bank to screen. With his son and daughter-in-law, Dr. Rosling co-authored a bestselling book titled Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, which was published posthumously in 2018.

Dr. Rosling was one of Gates’s mentors. He spent 20 years studying outbreaks of konzo and treating patients in remote parts of Africa. He also worked in Mozambique during the cholera epidemic of the early 1980s, and in the Congo to test the nutritional value of cassava roots. Dr. Rosling’s research explored the links between agriculture, economic development, health, and poverty. His approach to aid work had a profound influence on Gates. In Chapter 2, she claims that he helped her “see poverty through the eyes of the poor” (29). It was Dr. Rosling who encouraged her to seek out people on the margins and to strive to create a more inclusive world. In 2016, a dying Dr. Rosling drew two perpendicular roads on a piece of paper and reminded Gates to help those who were furthest away from the intersection. It was his way of asking her to carry on his work, the map stressing the geography of poverty. By contrast, Gates emphasizes the “social geography of poverty” (240), seeking out sex workers who live in the middle of large cities, but who are entirely cut off from mainstream society. 

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist and the world’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Yousafzai’s activism promoting girls’ education started when she was a child living in Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan, then under Taliban control. Yousafzai was a committed student thanks to her supportive family—notably her father, an education activist who ran a private school chain called the Khushal Public School. In 2008, she began writing a blog for BBC Urdu describing her life in Swat under the Taliban. For her own safety, she wrote under the pseudonym, Gul Makai (the Pashto word for “cornflower”). In January 2009, the Taliban set an edict forbidding girls in Swat from attending school, but many families defied the order. Yousafzai became a vocal opponent of the Taliban, giving interviews on AVT Khyber, Capital Talk, and Canada’s Toronto Star, among other platforms. Her activism won her a nomination for the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2011. However, it also drew the attention of the Taliban. On October 9th, 2012, a masked Taliban gunman shot 15-year-old Yousafzai in the face; two other girls were injured in the shooting (101).

The attempt on Yousafzai’s life received global media attention and led to an outpouring of anger. Protests erupted in several cities in Pakistan. The incident also spurred the ratification of the country’s Right to Education bill. After recovering from her injuries in England, Yousafzai used the media attention to advocate for girls’ education. She spoke at the UN in 2013 and met with several world leaders, including Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama. In 2014, she donated $50,000 to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to rebuild schools in Gaza (Wikipedia). Like Gates, Yousafzai heads an international non-profit organization (Malala Fund). The Malala Fund invests in advocates for girls’ education and works to curb child labor, marriage, and gender bias, all of which keep girls out of the classroom.