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The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 23, 2019
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“In her book, Melinda tells the stories of the inspiring people she’s met through her work all over the world, digs into the data, and powerfully illustrates issues that need our attention―from child marriage to gender inequity in the workplace.” ― President Barack Obama
“The Moment of Lift is an urgent call to courage. It changed how I think about myself, my family, my work, and what’s possible in the world. Melinda weaves together vulnerable, brave storytelling and compelling data to make this one of those rare books that you carry in your heart and mind long after the last page.” ― Brené Brown, Ph.D., author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Dare to Lead
“Melinda Gates has spent many years working with women around the world. This book is an urgent manifesto for an equal society where women are valued and recognized in all spheres of life. Most of all, it is a call for unity, inclusion and connection. We need this message more than ever.” ― Malala Yousafzai
"Melinda Gates's book is a lesson in listening. A powerful, poignant, and ultimately humble call to arms." ― Tara Westover, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Educated
A debut from Melinda French Gates, a timely and necessary call to action for women's empowerment.
“How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings – and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity.”
For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down.
In this moving and compelling book, Melinda shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. As she writes in the introduction, “That is why I had to write this book―to share the stories of people who have given focus and urgency to my life. I want all of us to see ways we can lift women up where we live.”
Melinda’s unforgettable narrative is backed by startling data as she presents the issues that most need our attention―from child marriage to lack of access to contraceptives to gender inequity in the workplace. And, for the first time, she writes about her personal life and finding her voice. Throughout, she shows how there has never been more opportunity to change the world―and ourselves.
Writing with emotion, candor, and grace, she introduces us to remarkable women and shows the power of connecting with one another.
When we lift others up, they lift us up, too.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFlatiron Books
- Publication dateApril 23, 2019
- Dimensions5.67 x 0.99 x 8.47 inches
- ISBN-101250313570
- ISBN-13978-1250313577
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A book about the importance of empowering women to create a more equal society, drawing on personal stories and data.Popular highlight
Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.4,598 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
“Their cup is not empty; you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.” If you don’t understand the meaning and beliefs behind a community’s practices, you won’t present your idea in the context of their values and concerns, and people won’t hear you.4,005 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.3,923 Kindle readers highlighted this
From the Publisher
The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“The Moment of Lift is an urgent call to courage. It changed how I think about myself, my family, my work, and what’s possible in the world. Melinda weaves together vulnerable, brave storytelling and compelling data to make this one of those rare books that you carry in your heart and mind long after the last page.”―Brené Brown, Ph.D., author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Dare to Lead
“An inspirational look at the need to empower women to make change in the world.” ―The Washington Post
“[The Moment of Lift] is a moral appeal, imploring each of us who reads it to look around ― at our own families, our own workplaces, our own place in a gigantic, but highly connected, world ― and get to work making it more equal.” – Chicago Tribune
"Drawing on her vast experiences meeting women in far-flung corners of the developing world, Gates’ book is a heartfelt memoir about stepping out of her comfort zone, as well as a manifesto of sorts about the transformative power of broadening women’s rights." ― Jessica Zack, San Francisco Chronicle
"At a time when beneficial globalization is being threatened by nationalism, and women’s rights are in danger of being rolled back to nineteenth-century norms, Gates offers urgent reminders of why it's necessary to help women everywhere achieve their full potential." ― Booklist, starred review
“Part memoir, part call to action, Gates’s compassionate narrative underscores her determination to leave a positive mark on this world. She inspires and emboldens in this eloquently argued work.” ― Publishers Weekly
“This book is a beautiful and concise mission statement on what we need to do to move society forward―continue to empower women. At every level and in all places women are truly the bedrock supporting their communities.” ― Trevor Noah
“Melinda Gates uplifts and inspires by weaving a narrative of fortitude and hope. She pushes us to challenge the status quo and never settle.” ― Mellody Hobson
“The Moment of Lift is a gift to humanity. With concrete stories and examples, Melinda Gates helps us see and embrace the great truths – “The goal is for everyone to be connected. The goal is for everyone to belong. The goal is for everyone to be loved.” Melinda’s message is so real, so personal, so intelligent, so needed. If only everyone would read it and know it, we would all rise up together!” ― Richard Rohr
“The Moment of Lift is a book about gender equity and its golden thread is empathy. This book lifts up the voices of women and girls whose experiences have been entirely unlike Melinda’s own. They’ve taught her a great deal, and in this beautifully crafted and artful memoir, Melinda Gates invites the reader to learn from them too.” ― Paul Farmer, M.D., co-founder of Partners In Health
“I think this is one of the best books I've ever read.” ― Warren Buffett
About the Author
As the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda sets the direction and priorities of the world's largest philanthropy. She is also the founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company working to drive social progress for women and families in the United States.
Melinda grew up in Dallas, Texas. She received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Duke University and an MBA from Duke's Fuqua School. Melinda spent the first decade of her career developing multimedia products at Microsoft before leaving the company to focus on her family and philanthropic work. She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, Bill. They have three children, Jenn, Rory, and Phoebe.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Moment of Lift
How Empowering Women Changes the World
By Melinda GatesFlatiron Books
Copyright © 2019 Melinda GatesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-31357-7
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Introduction,
Chapter One The Lift of a Great Idea,
Chapter Two Empowering Mothers: Maternal and Newborn Health,
Chapter Three Every Good Thing: Family Planning,
Chapter Four Lifting Their Eyes: Girls in Schools,
Chapter Five The Silent Inequality: Unpaid Work,
Chapter Six When a Girl Has No Voice: Child Marriage,
Chapter Seven Seeing Gender Bias: Women in Agriculture,
Chapter Eight Creating a New Culture: Women in the Workplace,
Chapter Nine Let Your Heart Break: The Lift of Coming Together,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Resource Guide of Organizations That Readers Can Support,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
The Lift of a Great Idea
Let me start with some background. I attended Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Dallas. In my senior year, I took a campus tour of Duke University and was awed by its computer science department. That decided it for me. I enrolled at Duke and graduated five years later with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's in business. Then I got a job offer from IBM, where I had worked for several summers, but I turned it down to take a job at a smallish software company called Microsoft. I spent nine years there in various positions, eventually becoming general manager of information products. Today I work in philanthropy, spending most of my time searching for ways to improve people's lives — and often worrying about the people I will fail if I don't get it right. I'm also the wife of Bill Gates. We got married on New Year's Day in 1994. We have three children.
That's the background. Now let me tell you a longer story — about my path to women's empowerment and how, as I've worked to empower others, others have empowered me.
* * *
In the fall of 1995, after Bill and I had been married nearly two years and were about to leave on a trip to China, I discovered I was pregnant. This China trip was a huge deal for us. Bill rarely took time off from Microsoft, and we were going with other couples as well. I didn't want to mess up the trip, so I considered not telling Bill I was pregnant until we came back. For a day and a half, I thought, I'll just save the news. Then I realized, No, I've got to tell him because what if something goes wrong? And, more basically, I've got to tell him because it's his baby, too.
When I sat Bill down for the baby talk one morning before work, he had two reactions. He was thrilled about the baby, and then he said, "You considered not telling me? Are you kidding?"
It hadn't taken me long to come up with my first bad parenting idea.
We went to China and had a fantastic trip. My pregnancy didn't affect things except for one moment when we were in an old museum in Western China and the curator opened an ancient mummy case; the smell sent me hurtling outside to avoid a rush of morning sickness — which I learned can come at any time of day! One of my girlfriends who saw me race out said to herself, "Melinda's pregnant."
On the way home from China, Bill and I split off from the group to get some time alone. During one of our talks, I shocked Bill when I said, "Look, I'm not going to keep working after I have this baby. I'm not going back." He was stunned. "What do you mean, you're not going back?" And I said, "We're lucky enough not to need my income. So this is about how we want to raise a family. You're not going to downshift at work, and I don't see how I can put in the hours I need to do a great job at work and raise a family at the same time."
I'm offering you a candid account of this exchange with Bill to make an important point at the very start: When I first confronted the questions and challenges of being a working woman and a mother, I had some growing up to do. My personal model back then — and I don't think it was a very conscious model — was that when couples had children, men worked and women stayed home. Frankly, I think it's great if women want to stay home. But it should be a choice, not something we do because we think we have no choice. I don't regret my decision. I'd make it again. At the time, though, I just assumed that's what women do.
In fact, the first time I was asked if I was a feminist, I didn't know what to say because I didn't think of myself as a feminist. I'm not sure I knew then what a feminist was. That was when our daughter Jenn was a little less than a year old.
Twenty-two years later, I am an ardent feminist. To me, it's very simple. Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.
This isn't something I could have said with total conviction even ten years ago. It came to me only after many years of listening to women — often women in extreme hardship whose stories taught me what leads to inequity and how human beings flourish.
But those insights came to me later. Back in 1996, I was seeing everything through the lens of the gender roles I knew, and I told Bill, "I'm not going back."
This threw Bill for a loop. Me being at Microsoft was a huge part of our life together. Bill cofounded the company in 1975. I joined Microsoft in 1987, the only woman in the first class of MBAs. We met shortly afterward, at a company event. I was on a trip to New York for Microsoft, and my roommate (we doubled up back then to save money) told me to come to a dinner I hadn't known about. I showed up late, and all the tables were filled except one, which still had two empty chairs side by side. I sat in one of them. A few minutes later, Bill arrived and sat in the other.
We talked over dinner that evening, and I sensed that he was interested, but I didn't hear from him for a while. Then one Saturday afternoon we ran into each other in the company parking lot. He struck up a conversation and asked me out for two weeks from Friday. I laughed and said, "That's not spontaneous enough for me. Ask me out closer to the date," and I gave him my number. Two hours later, he called me at home and invited me out for that evening. "Is this spontaneous enough for you?" he asked.
We found we had a lot in common. We both love puzzles, and we both love to compete. So we had puzzle contests and played math games. I think he got intrigued when I beat him at a math game and won the first time we played Clue, the board game where you figure out who did the murder in what room with what weapon. He urged me to read The Great Gatsby, his favorite novel, and I already had, twice. Maybe that's when he knew he'd met his match. His romantic match, he would say. I knew I'd met my match when I saw his music collection — lots of Frank Sinatra and Dionne Warwick. When we got engaged, someone asked Bill, "How does Melinda make you feel?" and he answered, "Amazingly, she makes me feel like getting married."
Bill and I also shared a belief in the power and importance of software. We knew that writing software for personal computers would give individuals the computing power that institutions had, and democratizing computing would change the world. That's why we were so excited to be at Microsoft every day — going 120 miles an hour building software.
But our conversations about the baby made it clear that the days of our both working at Microsoft were ending — that even after the children were older, I would likely never go back there. I had wrestled with the idea before I was pregnant, talking with female friends and colleagues about it, but once Jenn was on the way, I had made up my mind. He didn't try to talk me out of it. He just kept asking, "Really?!" As Jenn's birth approached, Bill started asking me, "Then what are you going to do?" I loved working so much that he couldn't imagine me giving up that part of my life. He was expecting me to get started on something new as soon as we had Jenn.
He wasn't wrong. I was soon searching for the right creative outlet, and the cause I was most passionate about when I left Microsoft was how you get girls and women involved in technology, because technology had done so much for me in high school, college, and beyond.
My teachers at Ursuline taught us the values of social justice and pushed us hard academically — but the school hadn't conquered the gender biases that were dominant then and prominent today. To give you a picture: There was a Catholic boys high school nearby, Jesuit Dallas, and we were considered brother-sister schools. We girls went to Jesuit to take calculus and physics, and the boys came to Ursuline to take typing.
Before I started my senior year, my math teacher, Mrs. Bauer, saw Apple II + computers at a mathematics conference in Austin, returned to our school, and said, "We need to get these for the girls." The principal, Sister Rachel, asked, "What are we going to do with them if nobody knows how to use them?" Mrs. Bauer replied, "If you buy them, I'll learn how to teach them." So the school reached deep into the budget and made its first purchase of personal computers — five of them for the whole school of six hundred girls, and one thermal printer.
Mrs. Bauer spent her own time and money to drive to North Texas State University to study computer science at night so she could teach us in the morning. She ended up with a master's degree, and we had a blast. We created programs to solve math problems, converted numbers to different bases, and created primitive animated graphics. In one project, I programmed a square smiley face that moved around the screen in time to the Disney song "It's a Small World." It was rudimentary — computers couldn't do much with graphics back then — but I didn't know it was rudimentary. I was proud of it!
That's how I learned that I loved computers — through luck and the devotion of a great teacher who said, "We need to get these for the girls." She was the first advocate for women in tech I ever knew, and the coming years would show me how many more we need. College for me was coding with guys. My entering MBA class at Microsoft was all guys. When I went to Microsoft for my hiring interviews, all but one of the managers were guys. That didn't feel right to me.
I wanted women to get their share of these opportunities, and that became the focus of the first philanthropic work I got involved in — not long after Jenn was born. I thought the obvious way to get girls exposed to computers was to work with people in the local school district to help bring computers into public schools. I got deeply involved in several schools, getting them computerized. But the more I got into it, the more it became clear that it would be hugely expensive to try to expand access to computers by wiring every school in the country.
Bill believes passionately that technology should be for everyone, and at that time Microsoft was working on a small-scale project to give people access to the internet by donating computers to libraries. When Microsoft completed the project, they scheduled a meeting to present the results to Bill, and he said to me, "Hey, you should come learn about this. This is something we both might be interested in." After we heard the numbers, Bill and I said to each other, "Wow, maybe we should do this nationwide. What do you think?"
Our foundation was just a small endowment and an idea back then. We believed that all lives had equal value, but we saw that the world didn't act that way, that poverty and disease afflicted some places far more than others. We wanted to create a foundation to fight those inequities, but we didn't have anyone to lead it. I couldn't run it, because I wasn't going to go back to a full work schedule while I had little kids. At that time, though, Patty Stonesifer, the top woman executive at Microsoft and someone Bill and I both respected and admired, was leaving her job, and we had the temerity to approach her at her farewell party and ask her if she would run this project. She said yes and became the first foundation employee, working for free in a tiny office above a pizza parlor.
That's how we got started in philanthropy. I had the time to get involved when I was still at home with Jenn because we didn't have our son, Rory, until Jenn was 3 years old.
I realize in looking back that I faced a life-forming question in those early years: "Do you want to have a career or do you want to be a stay-at-home mom?" And my answer was "Yes!" First career, then stay-at-home mom, then a mix of the two, then back to career. I had an opportunity to have two careers and the family of my dreams — because we were in the fortunate position of not needing my income. There was also another reason whose full significance wouldn't become clear to me for years: I had the benefit of a small pill that allowed me to time and space my pregnancies.
It's a bit ironic, I think, that when Bill and I later began searching for ways to make a difference, I never drew a clear connection between our efforts to support the poorest people in the world and the contraceptives I was using to make the most of our family life. Family planning became part of our early giving, but we had a narrow understanding of its value, and I had no idea it was the cause that would bring me into public life.
Obviously, though, I understood the value of contraceptives for my own family. It's no accident that I didn't get pregnant until I had worked nearly a decade at Microsoft and Bill and I were ready to have children. It's no accident that Rory was born three years after Jenn, and our daughter Phoebe was born three years after Rory. It was my decision and Bill's to do it this way. Of course, there was luck involved, too. I was fortunate to be able to get pregnant when I wanted to. But I also had the ability to not get pregnant when I didn't want to. And that allowed us to have the life and family we wanted.
Searching for a Huge Missed Idea
Bill and I formally set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. It was a merger of the Gates Learning Foundation and the William H. Gates Foundation. We named the foundation for both of us because I was going to have a big role in running it — more than Bill at the time, because he was still fully engaged at Microsoft and would be for the next eight years. At that point, we had two kids — Jenn was 4 and had started nursery school, and Rory was just 1 — but I was excited to take on more work. I made it clear, however, that I wanted to work behind the scenes. I wanted to study the issues, take learning trips, and talk strategy — but for a long time I chose not to take a public role at the foundation. I saw what it was like for Bill to be out in the world and be well known, and that wasn't appealing to me. More important, though, I didn't want to spend more time away from the kids; I wanted to give them as normal an upbringing as possible. That was hugely important to me, and I knew that if I gave up my own privacy, it would be harder to protect the children's privacy. (When the kids started in school, we enrolled them with my family name, French, so they would have some anonymity.) Finally, I wanted to stay out of the public work because I'm a perfectionist. I've always felt I need to have an answer for every question, and I didn't feel I knew enough at that point to be a public voice for the foundation. So I made it clear I wouldn't make speeches or give interviews. That was Bill's job, at least at the start.
From the beginning, we were looking for problems that governments and markets weren't addressing or solutions they weren't trying. We wanted to discover the huge missed ideas that would allow a small investment to spark massive improvement. Our education began during our trip to Africa in 1993, the year before we were married. We hadn't established a foundation at that point, and we didn't have any idea how to invest money to improve people's lives.
But we saw scenes that stayed with us. I remember driving outside one of the towns and seeing a mother who was carrying a baby in her belly, another baby on her back, and a pile of sticks on her head. She had clearly been walking a long distance with no shoes, while the men I saw were wearing flip-flops and smoking cigarettes with no sticks on their heads or kids at their sides. As we drove on, I saw more women carrying heavy burdens, and I wanted to understand more about their lives.
After we returned from Africa, Bill and I hosted a small dinner at our home for Nan Keohane, then president of Duke University. I almost never hosted that kind of event back then, but I was glad I did. One researcher at the dinner told us about the huge number of children in poor countries who were dying from diarrhea and how oral rehydration salts could save their lives. Sometime after that, a colleague suggested we read World Development Report 1993. It showed that a huge number of deaths could be prevented with low-cost interventions, but the interventions weren't getting to people. Nobody felt it was their assignment. Then Bill and I read a heartbreaking article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times about diarrhea causing millions of childhood deaths in developing countries. Everything we heard and read had the same theme: Children in poor countries were dying from conditions that no kids died from in the United States.
Sometimes new facts and insights don't register until you hear them from several sources, and then everything starts coming together. As we kept reading about children who were dying whose lives could be saved, Bill and I began to think, Maybe we can do something about this.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates. Copyright © 2019 Melinda Gates. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Flatiron Books; First Edition (April 23, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250313570
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250313577
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.67 x 0.99 x 8.47 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #89,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #81 in Social Activist Biographies
- #151 in Feminist Theory (Books)
- #989 in Women's Biographies
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About the author
Melinda French Gates is a philanthropist, businesswoman, and global advocate for women and girls.
As the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda sets the direction and priorities of the world’s largest philanthropy. She is also the founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company working to drive social progress for women and families in the United States.
Melinda grew up in Dallas, Texas. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Duke University and an MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School. Melinda spent the first decade of her career developing multimedia products at Microsoft before leaving the company to focus on her family and philanthropic work. She has three children, Jenn, Rory, and Phoebe, and lives in Seattle, Washington.
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Speaking so candidly from breaking the stereotype of 'an American billionaire wife giving away money' to the chemistry between Bill Gates and Melinda is real and beautiful and that of an equal partnership based on talent, interest and experience. Melinda tackles a range of global issues with such finesse including poverty, hard-hitting stories on maternal and newborn deaths, of fetotomy (bringing out a dead infant in pieces with mothers bleeding to death), making contraceptives available as 1st priority to women so women have the right to time and space their births, men beating up women for condoms to avoid pregnancy, the stigmatization of family planning as a population control and religious conspiracy, the horrific extremist forces of Boko Haram who kidnap girls forbidden them of education hoping that families will keep their girls home out of fear, the lack of recognizing unpaid work such as cooking, cleaning, childcare as 'real work', the Silicon Valley sexism of Susan Fowler's sexual harrassment charges and the #MeToo movement with Uber.
She raises thought-provoking policies and topics when decisions are made for women by men and how to create the moment of lift alongside men and not instead of men.
P. S. Every page moved me in this book. The most touching were the stories where the only way to put food on a table for some women is by being a sex worker. I wish to hold one of them, embrace them as long as possible with a hug. I wish to meet, sit down and listen to her politely about her life. That's the deepest and real human connection I crave to experience.
While my daughters are too young to read the book right now, when they are older I will definitely make sure they read this wise book. For now, I have sent copies to my mother, my sister, and a friend because I was so moved by this book.
I learned a lot about Melinda Gates' that I didn't know - about her background, her role within Microsoft, her marriage to Bill Gates, and most of all her role within the Gates Foundation. And while the issues she raised, those facing women, were not new ideas to me, her approach to tackle them, and the amount of work she's put forth to do so, was inspirational. It's easy to criticize someone for simplifying complex issues just to make them understood by the masses, but we shouldn't criticize someone working so hard to make a difference in the world. We should be celebrating her. She even makes the point that as much as she has seen, and as much as she's tried to do, she knows she can't compare her own journey with those of others who don't have the money, resources, or support system that she has. Obviously reading a few paragraphs about a village in Africa changing the very core of their cultural norms makes it sound much easier than it could possibly have been, but by getting points across in a clear and concise manner, Gates can put us all on a path of thinking about how we can solve issues such as these closer to home. Gates writes of an idealized world where all humans are created equal regardless of gender, socio-economic class, or race, but isn't it a beautiful world to imagine?
Top reviews from other countries
Gates really drove home the messages of Christianity and that women are doing the heavy lifting in the farm fields, "Next time you're in Africa driving in a rural area, look out the window and see who's working in the fields. They're almost all women. If you listen only to the men, because they're the ones with the time and social permission to go to the meetings, then you're not going to know what the women really need, and they're the ones who are doing most of the work." This totally brought driving through Jordan, Qatar, and Egypt to my mind, in that we only ever saw men and boys out in the streets, socializing all hours drinking tea and smoking hugging and chatting, while the women and girls were nowhere to be seen I gather because in Muslim culture the women are always hard at work inside. We looked for and didn't see girls among the crowds of boys in school uniforms.
Anyways, these were some of my favorite facts from The Moment of Lift: Did you know that Boko Haram's name actually means "Western education is forbidden"? Or that for girls age 15 to 19 around the world, the leading cause of death is childbirth? Or that the US is one of only seven countries in the world that do not provide paid maternity leave - joining Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and a handful of other island nations?