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I remember my first meeting with my management team when I became Indonesia's Minister of Finance. I was the youngest person and the first woman ever to hold that job. Everybody else in the room was male. I knew then that I had to work harder than any man to prove to them that I was capable.

I should point out that I was intimately involved with a group of women here a year and a half ago when there was an effort made by a right wing element in the President's party to get him to turn back the clock.

I was pretty young when my father was prime minister, so it wasn't really a big part of my life. My folks were away a lot, meeting foreign dignitaries and that sort of thing, but it never struck me as odd. If anything it allowed me to get into all sorts of mischief.

At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man's world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries. But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere.

But let me tell you, this gender thing is history. You're looking at a guy who sat down with Margaret Thatcher across the table and talked about serious issues.

My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s.

I was leader of the Opposition when Vajpayee was PM. We attacked policies, not personalities, neither inside or outside the House.

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.