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Quote by Melinda Gates

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The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

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Melinda Gates
Melinda Gates

Melinda Gates is a distinguished businesswoman and philanthropist, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world's largest private foundations. She has been deeply involved in the foundation's efforts to improve global health and education, with a particular focus on reducing poverty and enhancing lives worldwide. more

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“There should be some drug for fathers of teenage girls. Something that calmed your heart so it didn't practically rip through your chest. Something that could soothe the fury your daughter could inspire, the absolute terror that something unspeakable would happen to her, the almost murderous sense of protection. Something that would give you the words to tell her that no one would ever love her as much as dear old dad, and if she just listened to him, she'd have a much easier time of things and be safe from boys who ruined her life.”

“People will point to books written about women, by men, and books written by women, and say, ‘Tell me, what is the difference?’ The answer… ‘Well, how many books do you know where female friendships are authentically portrayed, where childbirth is really portrayed, where the mother-daughter relationship is talked about in a meaningful way, where women's real experience during wartime is portrayed? You could look at what’s left out.’ Virginia Woolf said so well in A Room of One’s Own: ‘Women are inevitably portrayed in men's literature as having to do with men; their lives are seen as centered on men. And how little of a woman's life this is!’” ~ Ellen Silber, PH.D in Shireen Dodson’s the Mother-Daughter Book Club”

“She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics. {Bernal on the death of scientist Rosalind Franklin}”

“So, Rosalind became a symbol, first of an argumentative swot, then of a downtrodden woman scientist, and finally of a triumphant heroine in a man's world. She was none of these things and would have hated all of them. She was simply a very good scientist with an ambition, as she told Colin from her hospital bed, to be a Fellow of the Royal Society before she was 40. But she died at thirty-seven.”

“It is in these moments that I wonder--despite my love of and commitment to science--if I have chosen the right track. Should I be following the long-established path carved out for me by my family, a path stolen from so many Jewish women and men by the Nazis during the past, horrible war? Do I owe it to them to carry on the Franklin traditions in their name?”