Mindy Kaling Is Our New Girl Power Hero!

Mindy Kaling is a girl power icon in many respects.

She's an actress, best known for her roles as Kelly Kapoor on The Office and the title character in Mindy Lahiri in The Mindy Project on Fox. She was the only woman on a staff of eight writers for The Office. On The Mindy Project, which she created, she is the executive producer and a head writer.

On top of her success in show business, she also wrote the hit book Is Everyone Hanging Out With Me? (And Other Concerns), and her hilarious, but super relatable, tweets have made 2.4 million of us want to be her Twitter BFFs.

Many qualities set Mindy apart in the world of show business, and what makes her so awesome is that she's refused to rely on those differences to propel her to success. As a woman of Indian origin, she's determined to create roles that don't peg her as a stereotype or background character.

"My career has only become what it has out of sheer need, not because I wanted it that way," she said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. "I knew if I wanted to perform I was going to have to write it myself."

Being a female in comedy could have been a hurdle for Mindy. Instead, she used the expectation to her advantage.

"A lot of times if there's a female lead, there's a tacit thing that you can lower the standard for comedy because of some weird understanding that female viewers can't handle it," she said. "It's been nice not abiding by that."

Mindy seems to have decided that just because she wasn't born a white male doesn't mean she can't do everything that a white male can. In fact, she says it's not something she thinks about too much when she's being creative.

"Most of the time when people want to talk to me about my job it's about three things: not skinny, multicultural, women who is female," Mindy said. "I don't want to minimize that it's a source of inspiration to young people, but I was just born in this skin, it's not something I think about while I'm writing."

Mindy is the epitome of girl power. She is the kind of woman many girls can relate to, and most girls would love to befriend. She's proof that race and gender can't hold back creativity and ambition, and the kind of self-made woman we should all aspire to be.