As Singapore’s ambassador to the United States, I was frequently asked to speak at women’s forums for professionals, executives and students.

They wanted to learn from women in top positions about how they got there, how to prepare for leadership roles and how to achieve success, however you define it. I believe many young women in Singapore ask those questions as well. The 50th anniversary of the nation’s independence gives us time to ask if anything has changed in the issues listed here.

At one forum, I was asked a question I had never encountered before. “How did you, an Asian woman, come to be what you are? Isn’t it true that, in Asian culture, women are supposed to be kept subordinate to men?”

I thought for a moment and responded spontaneously and truthfully. I told the young students in the audience that Asian culture has a way of compensating. I told them that, when I was born, my mother sent my birth details to a fortune teller in Hong Kong to have my horoscope written up. Back came the forecast.

My mother was told: “Your daughter’s life is like a man’s. She will be capable and do many things.”

It is amazing how often my mother repeated to me that my life was like that of a man. I do not know in her world of the late 1940s and 1950s what that meant to her. She did not know what impact it had on me but, by repeating that line, she was equalizing the gender gap for me.