To say Angela Chao grew up with shipping is an understatement.

Her father, James Chao, built New York shipowner Foremost Group from the ground up as he and wife Ruth Mulan Chu Chao raised six daughters.

When she was just nine, Angela began joining her father on ship visits, exploring the vessels from the inside out, including ballast tanks and cargo holds.

After taking her first job at Foremost in 1996 and rising through the ranks, she has just been named chief executive and chairman as her father enters retirement, although he will stay involved as honorary chairman and company founder.

But perhaps more importantly than exposing their daughters to the shipping industry, James and Ruth taught their daughters to overcome adversity with a positive attitude.

A Chinese-born merchant mariner, James started the company in 1964 as Foremost Maritime after moving his family to the US and starting basically from scratch, with few connections and little money. The company now has 17 modern bulkers and 13 more on order, according to Clarksons, as well as a customer base that includes top charterers.

The lessons the Chao parents shared with their children from this experience were full of optimism and hope, and the mantra of “honour, integrity, performance” was as much a statement of the family’s values as of the company’s.

They encouraged their daughters to be leaders, and that is what they have become. Elaine Chao is transportation secretary in the cabinet of US President Donald Trump, and Christine is general counsel at Foremost after making a name for herself as a lawyer even before joining the family company.

Angela acknowledges that she and her sisters were annoyed by “prejudicial comments” about her father having only daughters to carry on the family’s legacy in business. But her parents urged them not to be discouraged, and to forge ahead.

“My mother would always say, ‘Don’t get mad, just prove them wrong. Just do what you are supposed to do and be part of the solution’,” Angela recalls, noting that all of her sisters have done that in their own fields.

Shipping is male-dominated, she admits, but so are all the industries that her family might be interested in. “Unfortunately, most of the good ones are male-dominated,” she tells TW+. “Which is why we have to work very hard to get into them and also pave a road for the generations after us.”

But she notes that in its New York and Shanghai offices, Foremost’s team is 50% women.

From those early days climbing though duct keels on her father’s ship inspections, Angela was fascinated with shipping. After graduating from Harvard and a stint in investment banking, she joined the company with a focus on finance. But she would later get involved in implementing the 1998 International Safety Management code, chartering, newbuildings, S&P, insurance and shipmanagement, among other areas. She stepped away from the company for only two years, returning to Harvard to obtain her master’s degree in business administration.

Why did she focus on the family business, while some of her sisters have charted a course outside of Foremost? “I made that choice very consciously and very deliberately. I really wanted to be part of my parents’ legacy and I wanted to carry it on,” she replies.

But despite her interest in shipping, she is more motivated by the values her parents infused into the company. “They could have done it in real estate. They could have done it in restaurants. I would have done anything that my parents had started because it’s the values that they imbued in the company. That’s what I’m trying to carry on.”