OPINION
Late at night, when the house is quiet, I often return to my work. Lecture slides wait unfinished on my laptop. A half-written conference abstract sits paused on the screen, abandoned earlier when I stepped away to cook dinner. Between answering emails, preparing for the next class, and completing writing tasks, I check in with my daughter, now a young adult navigating her own demanding world. It is in these quiet pauses that reflection finds its way in.
One such pause came when I opened an invitation in my inbox marking International Women’s Day celebration next week. This year’s theme calls on us to balance the scales. It is a powerful image with fairness restored, equilibrium achieved. Yet the longer I sit with this metaphor, the more I find myself questioning it.
What if the scales we are trying to balance were never designed for us in the first place?
The language of balance often suggests a simple equation: work on one side, family on the other. Adjust carefully and equality will follow. But the lived reality of many working women has never been so straightforward. I saw this long before I became a working woman and a mother myself.
Growing up, I watched my mother, a high school teacher, move through days that never seemed to have enough hours. She carried her classroom responsibilities into the evening, grading papers at the dining table after dinner was done. She balanced professional commitment with the everyday labour of sustaining a household and raising a family. What I rarely saw was time for herself. There was no moment to step back and check whether the scale was balanced.
Across generations, women have learned to carry these invisible weights without question and often without recognition.
Across generations, women have learned to carry these invisible weights without question and often without recognition, a reality long documented in research on women’s unpaid labour and the second shift (Hochschild, 1989).
For women living in diaspora, that labour often multiplies. Diaspora life is not simply about geographical movement. It involves a continuous negotiation of identity across cultures, values, and expectations. It requires translating between worlds while trying to remain faithful to each.
As a Bengali–Australian woman, much of my life has unfolded within this space of translation. At home, language, food, music, and memory carry the rhythms of a Bengali cultural inheritance, even as my life unfolds within Australian society and institutions. In the workplace, I inhabit the intellectual traditions of Western academia while carrying with me the cultural sensibilities that shaped my upbringing.
Balancing these worlds has been both a privilege and a challenge.
It has meant explaining one world to another, often acting as a bridge between different cultural logics. It has meant celebrating both traditions while constantly negotiating how they coexist in everyday life. And it has meant recognising that identity itself can feel like a balancing act. Alongside professional responsibilities and family life, there is also the labour of cultural translation, emotional care, and representation.
Emotional labour. Cultural negotiation. Caregiving. Representation.
These forms of work rarely appear in policy documents, performance metrics, or institutional dashboards. Yet they shape the everyday realities of countless women navigating professional and personal worlds. They are the unseen forces behind the appearance of balance.
Motherhood added yet another layer to this balancing act.
Being both a mother and an academic means living within a delicate choreography of time, care, ambition, guilt, and hope. The intellectual world rewards productivity and focus, while parenting demands emotional presence and flexibility. Neither role exists independently of the other. Looking back on the years of raising my daughter while building an academic career, I often ask myself difficult questions.
Were we ever truly taught how to balance these scales?
Were we equipped with the language to recognise the invisible labour they involve?
Were we given tools to protect our physical and mental wellbeing while navigating multiple expectations?
Too often, the answer is no.
Our societies celebrate the resilience of women while quietly depending on it. We praise women for doing it all without asking what it costs them to do so. And our education systems rarely prepare young people, particularly young women, for the complex realities of navigating identity, work, culture, and wellbeing. This is where my role as an educator becomes deeply personal.
Education is not only about transmitting knowledge. It is about shaping how people understand themselves and their place in the world. Every classroom is already full of diverse lives and stories: students who are the first in their families to attend university, students navigating multiple languages at home, students negotiating cultural expectations while trying to imagine their futures. When these experiences remain invisible, education flattens human complexity.
But when students are invited to reflect on who they are, what they bring, and how their identities shape their perspectives, something powerful happens. The classroom shifts from a space of information to a space of recognition. And that is where balancing the scales truly begins. Not by asking individuals to carry more weight, but by acknowledging the weight that already exists.
Recognition is powerful, but it is only the beginning, the first step. If education is where the scales begin to shift, it must also be where students learn how to question the structures that keep them uneven.
If education is to contribute meaningfully to gender equity, we must equip young people with more than professional competencies. We must equip them with the intellectual courage to question inequality, the empathy to listen across difference, and the confidence to claim their own voices. This requires education that is identity-affirming, culturally responsive, and inclusive. Education that recognises diversity not as a challenge to manage but as a source of insight and knowledge.
When a student realises that the many strands of their identity like culture, language, gender, history, are not barriers to success but sources of insight and lived knowledge, the scale shifts slightly. When a young woman learns to articulate her perspective with confidence, the scale shifts again. When institutions recognise that knowledge itself is enriched by lived experience, the shift becomes structural.
These shifts may seem small in isolation. But together, they reshape the conditions under which balance becomes possible. If we are serious about balancing the scales, we must begin with a simple yet profound act: seeing people fully. Seeing the invisible labour that sustains families, workplaces, and institutions. Seeing the cultural complexity that shapes identity. Seeing the emotional work that women so often carry quietly. And we must translate that recognition into action.
One practical step is embedding structured reflection on identity and belonging within education itself. Schools and universities should create spaces where students can examine how culture, gender, and social expectations shape their experiences of learning and work. These conversations foster the self-awareness and resilience needed to navigate an increasingly complex world.
Equally important is integrating wellbeing into our understanding of success. Balancing the scales cannot simply mean doing more. It must also mean learning how to care for physical and mental health while pursuing ambition and responsibility.
Because the truth is this: the scale will not balance itself.
For too long, women have been asked to adjust their lives to fit systems that were never designed with them in mind. Balancing the scales is not about becoming stronger women or proving that we can do it all. The real task is to build educational, professional, and social systems that finally learn to see women in the fullness of their identities and experiences.
Identity is never a single weight neatly placed on a scale. It is a constellation of histories, cultures, responsibilities, and aspirations that shape how we move through the world. For many women, particularly those navigating multiple cultures, roles, and expectations that weight has long remained layered and largely unseen.
Balancing the scales, therefore, cannot simply mean asking women to manage more. It must begin with recognising what has too often been invisible: the emotional labour, the cultural translation, the quiet negotiations that sustain families, workplaces, and communities.
Only when these realities are acknowledged can the promise of balance begin to mean something real. Balancing the scales begins with ensuring that women, in the fullness of their identities and experiences, are finally seen.
Education is where that shift must begin.