I never felt close to my dad. I spent my childhood feeling like he loved my sister, not me.
I've revised my opinion since his death. Nonetheless, my sister got a real career and I ended up a homemaker for a lot of years.
Women with similar interests to their father and TALENT for it sometimes take over the family business or go into a similar job. Women who are close to their father are more likely to have a serious career.
The quote above is from a blog where I talk about the challenges women face in terms of trying to establish a career. It focuses a lot on two things:
1. The blind spots women have because we are generally raised to be wives and moms.
2. The social issues we face because we talk to men in business like FWENDS and they respond to that by expecting a date and then we feel like MEN are all horrible sexist pigs and don't wonder what we might be doing wrong.
If you are a dad and you have a daughter and want her to have hope of career success and not be limited to looking for a man to provide for her, the single best thing you can do is spend time with her. Make sure she gets your view on life and learns to talk to a man about something other than dating him.
How do you do that when you like hunting and fishing and she likes painting her nails and playing with dolls? I have no idea, honestly.
But I have two sons and we get along well and they have helped bridge some things for me. For example, they got me playing games like Master of Magic by telling me "It's exactly like your FAVORITE: SimCity!"
I have a blog about playing city building games and I talk there about playing Master of Magic as a city building game.
Other things my sons told me to help me relate better to Master of Magic:
1. Death dresses all in black like a style choice. Get over it. It's not an accurate reflection of their ethics.
2. That spell is supposedly human sacrifice because it's the Death brand of magic, BUT in reality it suppresses population growth by ten percent. You should think of it like birth control.
We ended up having many conversations about how life magic was truly evil while being BRANDED as The Good Guys (TM). They take human troops into battle and then heal and resurrect them.
Over and over and over and over again.
Like you would have some seriously psychotic people if you did that. And that's just cruel.
They also have a spell that makes everyone HAPPY which allows you to BLEED the people for high taxes. We talk about it being like cocaine in the water.
When we were especially poor while I was a divorced single mom with a corporate job, I played SimCity and one son watched because we only had one computer. So I played how he wanted me to play to entertain him.
He recommended stuff that led to the acid cloud disaster I NEVER had before. It also got me the biggest industrial buildings I EVER saw.
Real urban planners play SimCity and play as "evil" and find out what happens when you do all the bad stuff. It's a safe way to test ideas and learn about processes and how they go wrong.
Girls get taught to be nice. Guys get taught to be practical, test limits, find fail points.
In reality if you want to be nice, you need to know those fail points and how to find them, preferably without doing a lot of damage in the process.
If you don't know where to draw that line, you will consistently "leave money on the table" by being too conservative and also too frequently crash and burn.
Maybe you can get your girl interested in making fishing lures "Because it's exactly like your FAVORITE: Earrings to lure prospective husbands!"
You fill in the blanks, but it is possible to add a new perspective and help a child relate to stuff you do if you make a little effort.
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