Blake Lively on why she won't refer to her daughter as 'bossy'

Blake Lively says women aren't as black-and-white as Hollywood makes it seem. 

In an interview for Glamour published Monday, Lively shared her thoughts on the complexity of women, why empowerment is essential to equality and how she empowers her own daughters. Her latest project, Her Husband's Secret, in which she's acting and producing, focuses on women Lively describes as both strong and flawed. 

"We all have a lightness, and we all have darkness, and we all have plenty of shades in between," she said. 

She wants her daughters (James, 2, and Inez, who is almost 1) to know their own strength, too. Which she tries to protect by not showcasing her insecurities around them. 

"We're all born feeling perfect until somebody tells us we're not," she said. "So there's nothing I can teach my daughter [James]. She already has all of it. The only thing I can do is protect what she already feels." 

Her husband, Ryan Reynolds, supports that too -- they are both conscious of the language they use around their daughters (automatically referring to a caterpillar as a "he," for example), and Reynolds has noted that they shouldn't jokingly refer to their daughter as "bossy." 

"There would never be any negative connotation for a man being a boss, so to add a negative connotation on a woman being a boss? It's belittling," she said. "It doesn't encourage them to be a boss." 

And no matter how many female-centered projects she's rocking, she says family always matters most. 

"Knowing that, everything else comes second," she said.