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Average rating3.7
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This is essentially an advertisement for the work the Gates Foundation does around the world with women and girls. Gates gives a voice to many women around the world who support hardships and highlights some of the key elements of progress that are most effective in empowering women and communities in poverty. Gates is emphatic that lifting women up around the world will also lift the communities around them. She uses some statistics to prove this point but they are light, as you would expect in a popular reading book.
My biggest problem with this book is the point-of-view of Gates. She toots her own horn quite a bit. For example, in one of the chapters, she talks about how she admittedly did a bad job when she worked at Microsoft allowing people to have family leave. Despite of this, she gives an anecdote of when she once succeeded at letting someone who worked for her see his sick brother. She apologizes for giving a positive anecdote for an enterprise she admittedly failed at but I don't forgive her.
I was personally distracted imagining Gates visiting all these poor communities in Africa as one of the wealthiest people in the world. To me, this is a fascinating contrast that I wanted to hear more about. How can you listen to and interact with people who have nothing, when you have so much? She acknowledges that she is rich and privileged. That is my problem. Rich and privileged is not the same as being one of the wealthiest human beings in the history of civilization. I was distracted and wanted to hear more about how she reconciles this. Granted, the book is about the women the foundation is helping but when it is filled with so many personal anecdotes, to me, this question begs answering.