The Moment of Lift summary

Since 1990, the global vaccination drive, in which the author’s foundation ended up participating, cut the number of childhood deaths from lack of vaccinations in half. Unfortunately, the same success story cannot be said about worldwide infant mortality rates. In fact, almost half of children who lose their lives under the age of five die within a month of being born. All in all, 3 million newborns die every year, with most cases occurring in remote, impoverished areas where hospitals are far away and medical professionals lacking.

The author and her husband decided they wanted to do something about this. In 2003, as a part of their global drive to reduce infant mortality, they established a partnership with an Indian team that was training community health workers. They then sent them to work in impoverished communities such as Shivgarh, a remote village in Uttar Pradesh, India’s second-poorest state where 300,000 newborn deaths occur every year.

Gary, a foundation colleague, was running workshops on family planning in Kanpur, India, where the impoverished residents were members of one of the lowest castes. Their livelihoods revolved around sorting through trash to find valuables to sell. This meant that Kanpur resembled a garbage dump.

While the locals were grateful for Gary’s insight on family planning, a ten-year-old local girl named Sona asked him if the foundation could also provide her with a teacher. Girls like Sona made the author realize that no matter how much contraception is available to women, impoverished communities won’t be able to break the cycle of poverty. Without proper schooling, girls like Sona will end up sorting through garbage like her parents, and the cycle will continue.

Even educated women continue to face countless hurdles in the world of work. But this doesn’t only mean in traditional workplaces – the gender imbalances in unpaid work are just as much of an injustice as the gender wage gap.

Whether it’s childcare, cooking or carrying out errands, unpaid labor is carried out by women more than men. The data reflects such disparities clearly. In India, for example, women engage in six hours of unpaid work on a daily basis, whereas for men that number reduces to one. Even in the United States, women partake in four hours of unpaid work on average but men in only two-and-a-half.

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.

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.

As the author spent the majority of her career at Microsoft, she’s directed a lot of her effort to tackling gender inequity in the industry she knows best – tech.

Even though Microsoft has always valued diversity, the ultra-competitive and often aggressive company culture had a very masculine element about it when she worked there in the 1990s. Microsoft has since gone through a cultural shift, in part due to the cultural changes that the author helped engender while leading a team of 1,700 people during her tenure at the company. She encouraged her employees to be honest about their mistakes and express their weaknesses.