An open letter to #GirlDads…who dream big for their daughters.

My dad was everything a daughter could possibly hope for in a father. He saw and loved me for who I am. He challenged me. He cheered me on. He taught me courage even when I didn’t know I needed it. He was my biggest mentor. The one that shaped my trajectory along the way with the most impactful guidance. Long before my first job. Long before I found myself, too often, to be the only woman in a room full of men, around an executive table. 

My dad’s teaching style was truly unique. He never just gave me all the answers. He never told me how to think. He never gave me a formula about how to live life. Instead, he encouraged me to be curious. To engage with the world around me with all my senses (as you can see from this picture). To make my own mind. To shape my own answers. And because he believed I can do all that (and everything I put my mind to), I did too. 

I lost my dad two years ago. But I will never lose his spirit. A spirit I am celebrating in this blog, in the hopes that it will inspire other fathers of daughters to do what he did for me so more and more women will join each other in the boardroom. And while I do think my dad and his teaching style was unique, I also think there are a few things that made a huge difference that any dad out there should consider doing for their daughters:

1. Tell and treat your daughter like she is singular in your eyes. My dad always saw me as... me. He asked a lot of questions. He showed a genuine interest in anything I was interested in - he even got into soccer just to please me and my brother! And yes, soccer - not the most typical thing you would expect from a little girl, right? But my dad celebrated that. He looked at me, at my skills and interests, my capability and capacity separated from gender norms in either direction. He ran down the sidelines of my soccer games taking pictures and cheering just as he did for my brother. I didn’t need to demonstrate certain characteristics because I “should”, or “shouldn’t”. There was space for the complexity of the mash-up I turned up to be - between loving sports, constantly experimenting with cooking, being stubbornly curious about advanced math but also absolutely loving getting lost in books and writing voraciously. My triumphs were celebrated, across sport, academics and other pursuits. How awesome is that?
2. Tell your daughter you see yourself in her.  This is so powerful to a little girl - perhaps the most inspiring thing you can do. This one had such a disproportionate impact on how I’ve navigated my professional career. I have never seen myself defined in a gender specific way but, instead, I saw myself the way he saw me: a person with some of his strengths and characteristics, combined with some of my mom’s great characteristics and some that were just my own. So tell your daughter she’s like you - it will give her a tremendous reservoir of confidence she will need later in life.
3. Treat her mom with respect. My mom (who is absolutely terrific as well) worked part time and played a pretty traditional household role while we were growing up, which my dad respected tremendously. The fact that she had a more traditional role didn’t mean that I would have to - in fact, the domestic skills I was taught, my brother was too. Later on, when my mom decided to return to university for a Masters Degree, my dad showed nothing but support. While they didn’t always agree and neither one of them always got their way, they appreciated their differences and the goodness they brought to us, as a family.   
4. Challenge your daughter. Thanks to my mom’s work and my father’s commitment to making it home on time, we were a family who sat together at the dinner table every night and had healthy debates about the news. My dad would listen intensely. He would then probe and would not stop questioning us until our opinions were properly reasoned. That taught me how to be crisp in my thinking and where to look for new angles and data to support my points of view. 
5. Tell (and show!) your daughter you are proud of her. There is really no way I could measure the impact of those words, coming out of my dad’s mouth - a man I loved so deeply and always looked up to. I’ll never forget the time I won a national award for an essay about peace when I was in 7th or 8th grade. This was a particularly unfortunate time in fashion history, and I chose a white mini skirt, a Hawaiian shirt, a v-neck sweater and raccoon eyeliner for the award ceremony. My dad took the day off to join me at the award ceremony, which was presided over by Barbara Boxer (who would later be a Senator from California) who was also on the County Board of Supervisors that my father reported to. And there was my dad, beaming with pride, introducing me to everyone. The look on his face, the words he used - those are the things I still vividly remember, even more so the award I went home with that day. 

I am sharing all these lessons with you because I am hopeful that his great gifts to me will also be passed on to other little girls by the fathers who love them. #GirlDads, know that YOU can make all the difference in how your little girls can become the much needed women in executive leadership roles. 

Thank you, Dad.