I love this pose. It sums up our daughter Kara perfectly.

Our daughter is many things but she is neither a shrinking violet nor a damsel in distress.

Who is she here? My first thought was Lara Croft. Or maybe Trinity from the Matrix films. Strong women both, although the Tomb Raider heroine was created with a body straight out of a pubescent boy’s fantasy, while Trinity had little genuine agency of her own, existing primarily to enable Neo’s destiny.

When I was growing up, there was a lack of truly strong, independent women for girls to look up to. Nowadays there are plenty across business, sports, comic-books and every other field of human endeavour. From Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Jessica Ennis-Hill to Buffy and the modern-day incarnations of Wonder Woman and Supergirl, there is no shortage of female role models to emulate.

It doesn’t hurt that Supergirl is a Kara too.

We may not have achieved true equality yet. The recent antics of certain high-profile male figures shows the playing field is not quite level yet. But we’re a lot further on than we were 30-40 years ago.

As a younger sister to two older brothers, Kara is tough, independent and believing she can do whatever they do. But she is also as much of a girly girl as she is a tomboy. She has grown up in a house where her parents both work, both cook and where many of the old gender boundaries don’t exist. (Although I still can’t tie her hair and her mum can’t change the oil in her car.)

I hope she grows up believing that she can be whatever she wants to be. And that the only things limiting her are her own ability and determination, and not her gender. I hope she never allows anything or anyone to stand in her way.

When she adopts a pose as fierce as this one, I’m not going to argue with her!

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