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As you become more successful, the gender barrier disappears. The credibility challenges you have during your growing up years starts disappearing when you start demonstrating success.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. I really had gender issues.

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance.

Four of my children are daughters, and I've watched them devote themselves to reading books about how little girls learn to become women - how they learn to deal with boys and men, and the different hurdles females have to go over.

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.

I couldn't wait to be an adult woman, and I'm glad I felt that way as a kid because, when I grew up, I realised I live in a world where the female form is really disrespected, and society is often trying to wrestle the female form into a shape that looks more like a young boy.

When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.

Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child's peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.

I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.