I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.

Bailey frames gender equality not as an abstract principle he adopted later, but as a baseline assumption formed by upbringing and daily experience. The remark suggests that one’s earliest social environment can normalize equality (or inequality) before ideology enters the picture. By crediting “strong women” around him, he implicitly acknowledges women’s agency and competence as formative forces, while also hinting at how sexism often depends on social conditioning rather than “natural” differences. In a broader cultural sense, the quote functions as a quiet rebuttal to claims that equality is a modern imposition: for him, it was simply the obvious way the world worked.