“What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.”

Baroness Margaret Thatcher
1925-2013

I happened to be in London when Baroness Margaret Thatcher died last week and I have to say, I became very nostalgic. Today she’s receiving a full military funeral in London, with heads of state from all over the world paying tribute to her service. What I have to share has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with what she represented to me as a girl growing up in England. When I was 8 years old, I knew nothing about her politics, but I did know she was a woman, and she made it seem perfectly normal and acceptable to be a succesful and powerful woman in a man’s world. I can’t think of another country during that era with a similar role model. She made me believe that, as a girl, I could do and be anything I wanted to be. I never once felt like I couldn’t go toe-to-toe with a man in any career I chose. She was courageous, outspoken, provoking and all the things that contemprary women like COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg advocate for.

Sandberg says in her book, Lean In, “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes. I believe that this would be a better world. The laws of economics and many studies of diversity tell us that if we tapped the entire pool of human resources and talent, our collective performance would improve. Legendary investor Warren Buffett has stated generously that one of the reasons for his great success was that he was competing with only half the population. The Warren Buffetts of my generation are still largely enjoying this advantage. When more people get in the race, more records will be broken. And the achievements will extend beyond those individuals to benefit us all.”

My hope, now that I live in America, is that more girls from younger generations will have the fortune of seeing more and more women at the top of the game.