Someone for my daughter to look up to...

Central Park Tour Guide: "And to this side, you'll notice children playing on a statue of a dog. That's Balto. In the 1920s, sled dogs helped save children from diphtheria in Alaska by traveling in terrible conditions with crucial medicine."

Me: "Sweet. We have a dog statue but not a statue of a woman."

Tour Guide: "Nope, there are three women." [Rolls eyes and smirks in an understanding way.] "They're all fictional."

No offense, Balto, you sound like a kick-ass K9. And I love pups, but for real?

(There are plans to add statues of *REAL* women in Central Park in New York in 2020. The move comes after years of people noticing how easily we forget nearly half of our population.)

I can't remember ever feeling like my ideas were not worth as much as a man's.

I always thought I could grow up to do whatever I wanted to do.

At my high school, you spoke if you had something to say. It was cool to be smart. Few people wore makeup. If they did, it's because they wanted to for themselves. At my high school, the only men around knew if they said anything disparaging to women, they'd have hundreds of them ganging up to explain how idiotic, hurtful and unproductive their thoughts were. And they never would criticize women because they were men who chose to teach young women.

I went to an all-girls school. I was raised by a mom who was raised by a single mom. She has a sister who has two daughters. The matriarchs like to take photos at family events with only the ladies. They call it our "strong women" photo. We've been taking those as long as I've been alive. I was raised by a dad who was amazed by me in the most incredibly supportive way. My brother always saw me as a person. I mean, an annoying, younger person, but a person.

Thinking I was less because of my gender has just never been a thing.

I recall having a conversation with a high school classmate in college. We talked about what it was like to now go to school with men (and boys). We both observed how we felt better prepared than many of the women around us. We had an amazing college-prep education, but it went beyond that. We noted how we came to class to learn. We never felt intimidated to raise our hands. We never thought a man should answer first.

I'm certainly not saying a single-sex education is a be-all and end-all. That's up to you and your families. I personally plan to send my children to public school at this point. I'm saying, I can't wait for a future when all girls realize they can be anything they want. It's not something anyone should have to be consciously taught, just something we should instill in girls by how we treat them.

I like to picture a day when we don't appear to be below dogs on the hierarchy of societal importance.

(Fearless girl isn't in Central Park or a real person either, but she's pretty rad.)