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 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, who is 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 recently when I opened an invitation in my inbox marking the International Women’s Day celebration. 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 not been so straightforward.
Growing up, I watched my mother, a high school teacher, balancing her professional commitments with the everyday labour of sustaining a household and raising a family. She carried her classroom responsibilities into the evening, grading papers with dinner simmering on the stove, or at the dining table after dinner was done. 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 learnt 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. For women living in diaspora, that labour often multiplies. Diaspora life is not simply about movement across borders but a continuous negotiation of identity across cultures, values, and expectations. As a Bangalee-Australian woman, my life unfolds within this space of translation between the cultural inheritance of home and the intellectual traditions of Western academia.
Balancing these worlds has been both a privilege and a challenge. It has meant acting as a bridge between worlds, explaining one cultural logic to another while celebrating both. In this space of negotiation, identity itself becomes a balancing act, shaped not only by work and family but also by 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 well-being while navigating multiple expectations?
Too often, the answer is no.
Our societies celebrate women’s resilience while quietly depending on it. We praise women for doing it all without asking what it costs them. Yet, education systems rarely prepare young people, especially young women, for the realities of navigating identity, work, culture, and well-being. This is where my role as an educator becomes deeply personal.
Education is not only about transmitting knowledge but shaping how people understand themselves and their place in the world. Classrooms are filled with diverse lives and stories that often remain unseen. 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. 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 differences, 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 by seeing people fully—the invisible labour, cultural complexity, and emotional work women so often carry—and translating that recognition into action.
One practical step is embedding reflection on identity and belonging within education. Schools and universities should create spaces where students can examine how culture, gender, and social expectations shape their experiences of learning and work, fostering the self-awareness and resilience needed for a complex world.
Equally important is integrating well-being into our understanding of success. Balancing the scales cannot simply mean doing more. It must also mean caring for physical and mental health.
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.
Dr Nira Rahman is an academic at the University of Melbourne, exploring identity, equity, and inclusive, partnership-driven pedagogy in higher education.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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