Melinda Gates’s book The Moment of Lift comes under criticism from Lily Meyer in her NPR blog post “'The Moment Of Lift' Is More Of A Whisper Than A Call To Action” for not being strident enough—and for focusing on other dimensions of women’s empowerment than abortion rights. But I, for one, am glad to have a book that tries to speak to those with a wide range of different political and religious views.

And, in addition to her message that women need to be treated better (the stories about the horrors of child marriage are especially powerful), Melinda Gates has another crucial message that should not be missed: individuals and communities have to be deeply understood in order to be deeply helped. Let me illustrate with a few quotations from The Moment of Lift.

I’ll start with two simple examples of a cultural fact that those from European-derived cultures might not guess: in many cultures, work that requires a lot of brute force and physical strength is women’s work. Here is Hans Rosling’s story:

Hans Rosling once told me [Melinda] a story that helps make the point. He was working with several women in a village in the Congo to test the nutritional value of cassava roots. They were harvesting the roots, marking them with a number, and putting them into baskets to take them down to the pond to soak. They filled three baskets. One woman carried off the first basket, another woman carried the second basket, and Hans carried the third. They walked single file down the path, and a minute later, as they all put down their baskets, one of the women turned around, saw Hans’s basket, and shrieked as if she’d seen a ghost. “How did this get here?!”

“I carried it,” Hans said.

“You can’t carry it!” she shouted. “You’re a man!”

Congolese men don’t carry baskets.

Importantly, in many extremely poor countries, a large share of the farming is done by women, who are hobbled in that endeavor by their cultures:

A landmark 2011 study from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization showed that women farmers in developing countries achieve 20–30 percent lower yields than men even though they are just as good at farming. The women underproduce because they do not have the access to the resources and information that men do. If they had the same resources, they would have the same yields.

Melinda tells the story of how a careful program of community discussion and persuasion did more to end genital cutting of young women in one region than coming from a stance of outrage would have done:

Molly Melching has spent her life proving that point. Molly is another one of my teachers. I told you about her earlier. We met in the summer of 2012, and she showed me one of the best approaches I’ve ever seen for challenging long-standing cultural practices.

I joined Molly in a town in Senegal, and we drove out together to a rural area to see the community empowerment program she runs there. As we spent an hour or so on the drive, Molly told me about coming to Senegal as an exchange student to refine her French in the 1970s. She quickly fell in love with the Senegalese people and culture—so much so that she decided to learn the local language, Wolof, as well.

Even while she loved the country, though, she noticed how difficult it was to be a girl there. Many girls in Senegal have their genitals cut very young—usually between 3 and 5 years of age. Many are married very young and are encouraged to have children quickly and often. Outside groups had tried to change these practices, but no one succeeded, and Molly found herself in a position to see why.

She became a translator for development programs, serving as the link between villagers and outsiders who wanted to help. She quickly saw that there was more than a language barrier dividing these two groups. There was an empathy barrier. The outsiders showed little skill in projecting themselves into the lives of the people they wanted to help, and they had little interest in trying to understand why something was being done in a certain way. They didn’t even have the patience to explain to villagers why they thought something should change.

On our drive out, Molly explained to me that the empathy barrier stymies all efforts in development. Agricultural equipment that had been donated was rusting out, health clinics were sitting empty, and customs like female genital cutting and child marriage continued unchanged. Molly told me that people often get outraged by certain practices in developing countries and want to rush in and say, “This is harmful! Stop it!’” But that’s the wrong approach. Outrage can save one girl or two, she told me. Only empathy can change the system.

Also, those being helped often have a different—and because it is their lives, more authoritative—ranking of priorities than those who want to help. The Gates foundation began by wanting to get sex workers in India to use condoms in order to slow the spread of AIDS. Here is the reaction they received:

“We don’t need your help with condoms,” they said, almost laughing. “We’ll teach you about condoms. We need help preventing violence.”

“But that’s not what we do,” our people said. And the sex workers answered, “Well, then you don’t have anything interesting to tell us, because that’s what we need.”

So our team held debates about what to do. Some said, “Either we rethink our approach or we shut this down.” Others said, “No, this is mission creep—we have no expertise in this area, and we shouldn’t get involved.”

Eventually, our team met again with the sex workers and listened intently as they talked about their lives, and the sex workers emphasized two things: One, preventing violence is their first and most urgent concern; two, fear of violence keeps them from using condoms.

Clients would beat up the women if they insisted on condoms. The police would beat them up if they were carrying condoms—because it proved they were sex workers. So to avoid getting beaten up, they wouldn’t carry condoms. Finally we saw the connection between preventing violence and preventing HIV. The sex workers couldn’t address the long-term threat of dying from AIDS unless they could address the near-term threat of being beaten, robbed, and raped.

So instead of saying, “It’s beyond our mandate,” we said, “We want to help protect you from violence. How can we do that?”

They said, “Today or tomorrow, one of us is going to get raped or beaten up by the police. It happens all the time. If we can get a dozen women to come running whenever this happens, the police will stop doing it.” So our team and the sex workers set up a system. If a woman is attacked by the police, she dials a three-digit code, the code rings on a central phone, and twelve to fifteen women come to the police station yelling and shouting. And they come with a pro bono lawyer and a media person. If a dozen women show up shouting, “We want her out now or there’s going to be a story in the news tomorrow!” the police will back down. They will say, “We didn’t know. We’re sorry.”

That was the plan, and that’s what the sex workers did. They set up a speed-dial network, and when it was triggered, the women came running. It worked brilliantly. One sex worker reported that she had been beaten up and raped in a police station a year before. After the new system was in place, she went back to the same police station and the policeman offered her a chair and a cup of tea. Once word of this program got out, sex workers in the next town came and said, “We want to join that violence prevention program, not the HIV thing,” and soon the program spread all over India.

Unlike Lily Meyer, I think Melinda’s book uses the quiet statement of horrific facts to powerful effect. The truth about the oppression of women is so stark that it doesn’t have to be shouted if someone is reading the book. And more of the people whose eyes would be opened by reading it are likely to read the book because it isn’t strident.