The Moment of Lift
Melinda French Gates writes about two decades of travel with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the women she met along the way. Each chapter pairs research on a specific lever, contraception, maternal health, girls in school, agricultural inputs, women in tech, with the stories of women she sat with in India, Malawi, Senegal, and the United States. She also writes candidly about her own marriage and the slow, uneven work of building an equal partnership at home. The argument is straightforward: when you lift up a woman, you lift up everyone around her. The book mixes data with first-person reporting in a way that keeps both grounded.
What you might want to know about The Moment of Lift
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Melinda French Gates traces how investing in women, from family planning to unpaid labor, raises entire communities, drawing on field reporting and her own marriage.
Yes. Brown contributed a jacket blurb calling the book an urgent call to courage that changed how she thinks about her family, her work, and what's possible in the world.
Both. Gates alternates field reporting on women she has met with personal chapters on her marriage and faith.
The Moment of Lift was written by Melinda French Gates, published in 2019 by Flatiron Books.
The Moment of Lift is 288 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Moment of Lift takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Moment of Lift is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.