“On average, women around the world spend more than twice as many hours as men on unpaid work,” writes Gates。 “But the range of the disparity is wide。” In poorer countries, women tend to spend even more time on unpaid work, deepening the divide between their opportunities outside of the home and those of the men around them。
In one telling (and hilarious) anecdote, Gates writes about how, when her daughter Jenn was in kindergarten, she had to drive back and forth to her school twice a day, a forty-minute commute each way。
She told her husband about her frustration with spending so much time in the car every day, and he offered to take on some of the drop-offs。 About three weeks in, she started noticing more dads than usual dropping their kids off in her daughter’s class。 Gates went up to another mom and asked what was going on。 The other mom replied: “When we saw Bill driving, we went home and said to our husbands, ‘Bill Gates is driving his child to school; you can too。‘”
In 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。
1995年,我跟比尔结婚将近2年了。当时我们准备出发去中国旅游,但我突然发现自己怀孕了。
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。
这场中国之行对我们来说很重要。比尔几乎没有请过假,而陪同我们一起去的还有其他几对夫妻。
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 realised: ‘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。’
Frankly, I think it’s great if women want to stay at 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。
Poverty goes hand-in-hand with powerless women。 If you search for poverty, you will find women without power。 If you explore prosperity, you will find women who have power and use it。
Quite simply, contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created。
简单来说,避孕措施这种伟大的发明,拯救了生命,有助于消除贫困,并赋予女性权利。
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 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 Rory was born three years after Jenn, and our daughter, Phoebe, three years after Rory。
I was no longer the computer science business executive。 I was a mom with a small child and a husband who was busy and travelling a lot, and we were moving into a gigantic house, and I was wondering what people would think of me, because that house was not me。 That’s where I was when I began the long climb toward an equal partnership。