Overarching question
We have read a lot of different stories from Melinda in the chapters we have read. These chapters and the linking of their main ideas are beginning to develop some larger overarching questions. You might want to begin to think about some of these as you read this time.
If you are not reading, they are still pretty powerful questions!!
All you need is love
Has Melinda been listening to our gatherings at West Hill?
Girls who go to school feel more confident and powerful. Women who are allowed to choose if and when they have children are more powerful. These women then work for the betterment for all lives in their communities, creating a tide of positive change that ripples throughout.
The goal is for everyone to be connected. The goal is for everyone to belong. The goal is for everyone to be loved.
So, like the Beatles said, all you need is love? Sounds simple, but Gates argues that it’s true. In summary, equity is a goal but it’s not the goal: “The goal is for everyone to be connected. The goal is for everyone to belong. The goal is for everyone to be loved.”
Would you agree?
Gates’ friend Killian Noe, founder of the Recovery Café, explains this principle behind her work: “To be known without being loved is terrifying. To be loved without being known has no power to change us. But to be known and deeply loved transforms us” (149).
Where do you see yourself on this spectrum of being deeply known and/or loved?
Have you had experiences of being one or the other, neither or both, and what impact did that have on your ability to be “excited about living”?
Is change a good thing?
Gates asks, “What gives me the right, as an outsider, to support efforts to change the culture of communities I’m not part of?” --- a question that many Westerners have when looking for ways to help developing countries .
No one is more aware of what it looks like when billionaires sweep in to solve the problems of people who live on the poorest and most neglected margins of society than Gates. She openly acknowledges this, wrestles with the concept, and defers to experts in their fields on every point who know more than her.
How do you perceive her work?
Does she try to change the culture in the places she visits? Is this a good thing?
What methods does she employ to try to encourage change? Do they improve the issue?
How do the personal narratives in THE MOMENT OF LIFT break down the barriers that encourage exclusion, which Melinda cites as a major cause of inequality and suffering?
Is listening enough?
Visit Melinda’s website, Evoke.org, which is a hub for empowering stories by and about women making a difference in their communities and join the conversation with #MomentofLift on social media.
On this web site was the statement:
Something powerful happens when you ask a woman to tell her story. And sometimes, the most forceful statement of support we can make for a woman is the one we make by listening.
Melinda has shared many stories from women she has met in her book. In reading these stories we are effectively listening to these women. Do you share her opinion that this is the most forceful statement of support?
Do you imagine ways to extend this support?
Is there anything you plan to do differently to help accelerate progress towards gender equality in your own home, workplace and community?
Specific topics this session
One of the most disempowering phenomena holding women back is child marriage.
At a dinner hosted by Dutch Princess Mabel van Oranje, the author became aware of how the horrors of child marriage tied in closely with her foundation’s pursuits in family planning and newborn and maternal health. She learned that child brides are the least likely group of girls to use contraceptives. What she was even more horrified to find out is that the number one cause of death among 15 to 19 year-old-girls is going through childbirth.
Child brides are a widespread phenomenon. In 2012, an estimated 14 million child marriages occurred, and a third of girls in emerging economies were married before turning 18. What’s more shocking is that almost 10 percent were married before turning 15.
Princess Mabel’s organization, Girls Not Brides, has the singular goal of putting a stop to child marriage by removing the social and economic incentives that cause it to happen in the first place. One of the major driving forces behind child marriage is, of course, poverty. When a daughter can be married off for money, her family will be better off – and have one less child of which to take care.
Gates states that “It’s important to be able to save girls from marriage, but it’s more important to address the incentives that prompt parents to marry off their underage daughters in the first place.”
These reasons notwithstanding, the toll that child marriage takes on girls’ lives is truly tragic. In poorer rural communities, it is often the case that girls are uprooted from their family and friends and shipped off to neighboring villages where they have no social connections. And from that point on, they are expected to take care of all housework, cleaning, cooking – and pregnancy. Altogether, child marriage is among the most disempowering experiences through which a girl can go.
Learning about all of this inspired the author to make a difference, so she teamed up with Tostan, an organization focused on empowering women in West Africa. Instead of Westerners telling developing countries how to behave, Tostan attempts to foster discussion on changing local traditions from the inside. In one program in Senegal, trained facilitators are sent to villages where they set up community workshops to discuss ideal futures that the villagers want to see for themselves. Gates talks about empathy barriers stymying all efforts of development. The founder of Tostan tells Gates that outrage can save one girl or two but only empathy can change the system. The approach of Tostan is not to judge from the outside but to discuss from the inside. They teach that ever person has fundamental rights.
Over time, the villagers realized the negative effects that child marriage was having on girls in their communities. This was not something they wanted to keep happening in the future. All in all, Tostan has been extremely successful – 8,500 communities in which they have worked have promised to put a stop to child brides.
“Tradition without discussion kills moral progress,” writes Melinda Gates.
“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. It kills the chance to see the blind spots in the tradition—and moral blind spots always take the form of excluding others and ignoring their pain.”
On the other hand: When communities challenge their own social norms in this way, people who were forced to bear the pain of a practice that benefited others now have their needs recognized, and their burdens eased. In the case of child marriage, a community-wide discussion based on empathy and guided by equality leads to a world where a woman’s marriage is no longer forced, her wedding day is no longer tragic, and her schooling doesn’t end when she’s 10. When you examine old practices to take out bias and add in empathy, everything changes.
Despite the success of Tostan, Gates is still questioning herself as to what makes it work and what gives her the right to get involved. Although she is funding the work of local people, the work of these insiders could be opposed by other insiders and she is choosing to back one group of insiders over another. “How am I not using my power to impose my values on a community?”
How do you feel about her involvement?
Gates outlines her beliefs and values on page 172 and feels that they are not personal values but universal values, and that she joins battles for changing social norms when she can support a move away from a culture that makes one group dominant over others.
Do you believe that they are Universal values?
How closely do you feel her values align with those we hold at West Hill?
Do you feel you would join her battle?
How did you feel when you heard that Fati; who had a fistula develop during childbirth and was kicked out in disgust by her husband; was hoping to heal so that she could return to her husband? Was it hard not to judge?
Gates says that gender based violence is “one of the most common human rights abuses in the world”. She continues, “There is no equality without safety”. Gender based violence is increasingly being reported here in Canada. Trafficking is all around us, along the 401 corridor particularly, with indigenous women being hugely affected by this.
What do you imagine we could do to help here?
Gate states that conversation accelerates change when the people who are talking to each other are getting better at being human and the starting point for human improvement is empathy. “Empathy allows for listening, and listening leads to understanding. That’s how we gain a common base of knowledge.”
Do you have any examples of such listening leading to understanding?
Women are being held back in the world of agriculture, and the consequences are dire.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was first interested in transforming agriculture through science alone --- developing seeds that would help farmers grow more food --- but ultimately discovered that gender bias would keep better seeds from reaching --- or benefiting the people who plant them. The resistance of some team members to shift views leads Gates to question in the book:
“How do you follow your plan and yet keep listening to new ideas?
How can you hold your strategy lightly, so you’ll be able to hear the new idea that blows it up?” (185).
Have you ever had to convince people in your work or family life to see things from a different perspective?
While most people in developed countries rely on supermarkets for food, the situation is quite different elsewhere. Not only are hundreds of millions of people growing food for their survival but data also shows that 70 percent of the poorest people in the world farm small plots of land to sell food to make ends meet.
The author’s foundation has been addressing the problems faced by this 70 percent for over a decade. By widening access to better seeds and holding workshops on more efficient farming techniques, they have made inroads into reducing malnutrition and poverty.
During a visit to Malawi in 2015, she met Patricia, a farmer trying to improve her crop yield in order to afford to send her children to school. But the cards were stacked against her – in Malawi, women cannot inherit land, meaning that unlike male farmers, she had to rent the land upon which she farmed. In addition, most women in her community don’t have control over their family’s spending. So if she needed additional farming supplies to up her yield, it was up to her husband to decide whether she got them or not.
Luckily, Patricia and her husband partook in CARE Pathways, a program that teaches farming techniques and the importance of gender equality in agriculture. During one of the sessions, Patricia and her husband took part in a family budgeting exercise, where they discussed how they could best invest their money to produce more results.
Patricia told the author that attending the program transformed her life. Not only did her husband begin accepting her requests for better farming equipment, but the program provided her with better seeds designed to produce bigger crop yields. Not only did these seeds quadruple her crop yield, they also allowed her enough additional income to send her children to school. What’s more, she was also able to empower other women in the community by providing them with the better seeds.
But Patricia is not alone. A 2011 study showed that female farmers in developing nations produce about 30 percent fewer crops than men, even though they are equally skilled. The study concluded that if women were empowered with better resources, their crop yields could match those of men. The resulting food surplus could lift 150 million people out of food poverty.
This link should open a radio interview which aired yesterday on CBC radio 1 The Current with Matt Galloway. It’s called ‘addressing child marriage in Canada’ The last bit is very specific to Canada. Definitely worth a listen.
Questions to ponder as you read or review the Chapter
- At the beginning of Catherine Bertini’s tenure with the Gates Foundation she was introduced to Bill Gates as “here working on gender.”
That word seemed to provoke Bill Gates . Melinda states that he supported women’s empowerment and gender equity but thought they would distract the foundation from the goal of growing more food and feeding more people and that would hurt their effectiveness. Others said “We are not becoming a social justice organization.”
Eventually he and many others at the foundation “came to agree that gender equity should drive the work we’re all trying to do.”
Were you surprised by Bill’s views?
Do you have other examples of where gender equity does or should drive the work?
- Melinda cites the gender barriers that prevent women from success in farming in developing countries despite the fact that they are good farmers. She says hitting these gender barriers could have made her step back and think that, “Culture change is not our role.”
What makes her move forward?
Do you feel that she is right to do so?
- Fighting for gender equity in agriculture was never Melinda’s plan. She asks “How do you follow your plan and yet keep listening for new ideas?”
Have you had a similar experience?
Can you answer her question from personal experience?
Does she answer her own question?
- The foundation began slowly and speaking softly to people who wanted to hear how a gender focus could help them achieve their goals. Melinda found it too slow. Eventually she wrote an article for an issue of “Science”, setting out the foundation’s commitment to gender equity. Principally it was a message to everyone who worked at the Foundation. She describes it as the strongest lever she ever pulled to direct the focus and emphasis of the Foundation. Were you surprised that she considered this a strong lever pull?
Were you surprised that she pulled the lever?
Can you think of any times when you or others have pulled a strong lever?
5. Gates states that empowerment never confines itself to categories. Once the agriculture issues began to make improvements the women started looking for new battles to fight and started to carry themselves differently. They were activists. They had been lifted up. This is the work that has been accelerated by the Foundation since Gates wrote her article for “Science”.
They are seeing the results that come from putting women and girls at the centre of their strategy.
Can you think of similar situations in our own society?
Can you think of situations that need such a strategy in our own society?
6. Gates states that disrespect grows when religions are dominated by men. This is echoed by Jimmy Carter who calls the deprivation and abuse of women “the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge,” and he lays the principal blame on men’s false interpretation of scripture.”
How do you feel about such statements?
7. Gates feels that bias against women is perhaps humanity’s oldest prejudice, and not only are religions our oldest institutions, but they change more slowly and grudgingly than all the others – which means they hold on to their biases and blind spots longer.
Do you feel the changes we have made at West Hill have eliminated these biases or is there still room for improvement?
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