The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates — Book Thoughts.
During my year out of high school, my aunt called to ask if I could help her take care of my two young cousins (monkeys?) while she was away for a one week trip.
My first instinct was “Yes!”.
Then “Great!”.
Then “Yes!”(Again).
That was a wonderful opportunity for me to bond with my(favourite) little monkeys.
Or was it?
Boy was I mistaken.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was Murphy’s law personified — absolute chaos lasting a week.
Getting the kids to wake up in the morning was a hassle, getting them to clean up was needless pain and torture, preparing breakfast was a comedy of errors, packing lunch for them was an impossible task(A lost lunch box. A lunch box without a lid. A lid without a water bottle).
You go on this continuum and you add to the equation cleaning the house.
And cleaning the dishes.
And going to the market.
And washing clothes.
And trying to maintain my sanity.(The little monkeys running around in every which way. The little monkeys yelling incessantly). ADHD was involved. I guess.
And preparing dinner.
And cleaning the dishes(Again).
And getting the little monkeys to hop into their bed. Often with a fight. Often with tantrums flying around.
It’s easy to see how the paranoia ramps up. It was total mayhem lasting a week.
One sickening thought that came to me during this experience was: “How do women go through this day after day, week after week, year after year?.”
My conclusion at the time was that God created men and women different. That women were given “special grace” to handle such drugery.
It should go without saying, but this was plain vanilla naivety.
On my end.
Later in college I learnt about Evolution, and how we evolved from simple cells to complex organisms through the process of natural selection. It dawned on me that evolution most likely did not natural select women for drudgery. It most likely did not embue women with “special grace”.
So to speak.
Melinda Gate’s The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World is such a heroine book.
It is full of really sad realities and heart breaking stories all over the world that marginalized people, and especially women have to endure.
I was obviously myopic as to the extent Bill and Melinda Gates are invested in trying to make life a little bit more comfortable for the unlucky. They have invested heavily in: Maternal and newborn health, family planning, girl child education, the fight against deadly and dangerous cultural practices such as early child marriage and FGM.
Melinda presents her case coherently on the disproportionately difficult and unpaid work that women have to do in a family setup — firewood gathering, fetching water from ridiculously long distances, cooking, cleaning, farming, taking care of the kids…the list of drudgery goes on.
She offers a useful framework of 3 Rs to help remedy this inequality: Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute.
Recognize that difficult and unpaid work is being done disproportionately by one party.
Reduce the number of hours occupied by unpaid work by leveraging on technology. e.g use of cook stoves, washing machines, dish washers.
Did I say automatic bed spreaders? Has a crazy nerd emerged from the woodwork with one yet? We need automatic bed spreaders! :-)
Redistribute the work more equitably.
It is worth noting that some of the biggest obstacles to the organization’s heroic work is deeply rooted local cultures, and religion. Melinda was demonized by the Catholic Church — of which she’s a devout member — for her support of contraceptives. .
I have always known that I need to update my brain software — that is with respect to how a family can equitably share domestic chores. The signs are all over the map. I acknowledge that my software is ancient and obsolete and buggy and I’m just bumping into hard objects and hard obstacles with it in control.(Third decade of the 21st century.)
It is still not entirely clear to me what this upgrade entails, and I’m still forming my mental model on this subject matter, but Melinda’s book offers a useful framework to work on.
Highly recommended.
