(^36) | marieclaire.com.au
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NEWSFEED
Confronting the realities of extreme poverty and
entrenched inequality doesn’t get easier – and that’s
important, because it shouldn’t. I learnt early on
that to do this work well, I had to be willing to let my
heart break. If you turn away from what you’re seeing
to protect yourself, then you’re not taking away what
you should be. But another way to think about it is
that your heart shouldn’t just break – it should break
open. Because that makes it possible to let in the good,
too. And I’ve met so many women around the world
who are doing such incredible things. They’re risking
their lives to deliver healthcare to women and children
in remote places, they’re starting schools for girls
who would otherwise end up child brides, they’re
challenging cultural norms to insist they should have
the right to decide if and when to get pregnant. They
believe a better future is possible and that they can
play a role in creating one. Their optimism fuels mine.
Part of the effort [to achieve gender equality] will
require fast-tracking women in the sectors that have
disproportionate influence in the Western world – such
as tech, banking, media and law – and I think we can
do that by making targeted investments in efforts
to connect these women to the opportunities
and resources they need to advance. But focusing only
on women in elite professions
is never going to be enough to
create true gender equity.
We also need to be
dismantling the barriers
holding women back
everywhere – like the fact that
America is in the middle of a
caregiving crisis that is disproportionately impacting
women. Sixty per cent of nonworking women say that
family obligations are keeping them out of the
workplace and, on average, women around the world
spend more than twice as many hours as men on
unpaid work. There is no country where the gap is
zero. Before we can close this gap, we have to recognise
it exists. The point of these conversations isn’t
necessarily to mandate that everything is exactly
50-50 all the time. It’s to ensure we aren’t just making
assumptions that one parent will automatically take on
a certain task because that is what’s always been done.
To give you just one example of what this has
looked like in our household: years ago, when our
eldest daughter started kindergarten at a school that
was 40 minutes away from our house, it was sort of
assumed that I was going to be the one doing all the
driving – and I was dreading it. So I told [my husband]
Bill that was going to be a lot of time in the car for me
every day, and we decided together that it made more
sense for us to split the task instead. He started driving
her two days a week and eventually other dads in the
class followed suit, because they realised if Bill Gates
had time to drive his daughter to school, so did they.
What if we made it a priority to ease [women’s]
caregiving burden and made it possible for anyone to
return to work if they wanted to? Right now, there is so
much energy behind the issue of gender equity that I
think this could be our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I’m thinking a lot about the role I can play in helping
every woman seize this moment. Watch this space.
The Moment of Lift (Pan Macmillan, $32.99), out now.
Melinda Gates
EMPOWERING
WOM EN
After almost a decade at Microsoft, Melinda
Gates has devoted herself to improving the lives
of women and girls across the globe. In her new
book, The Moment of Lift, she encourages
us all to find new ways to lift up women
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT...
“WOMEN SPEND
MORE THAN
TWICE AS MANY
HOURS AS MEN
ON UNPAID WORK”
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