Balancing the scales
March 8, 2026, marks International Women’s Day, themed Balancing the Scales, a call to create a world where opportunities, safety, and respect for women and girls are neither optional or conditional, but embedded, equitable, and enduring.
The theme invites us to move beyond awareness toward active rebalancing, examining the structures, habits, and cultural norms that skew the scales.
The United Nations reminds us why this work remains urgent:
“Ensuring women’s and girls’ rights across all aspects of life is essential to building just, resilient, and sustainable societies for future generations.”
The role of all boys’ schools
As a single‑gender school for boys, this challenge is not peripheral, it must be central.
Boys’ schools are often criticised or misunderstood in conversations about gender equality, as though separation by gender diminishes our capacity or commitment to progress. This is an outdated concept, and one used to speak up against single-gender boys’ schools.
Boys’ schools hold a uniquely influential role. Our students are at the age where values are forming, character is shaped and ethical foundations are set.
Our students are sons, brothers, friends, and future partners. They witness firsthand the strength, intellect, love, and leadership of the women in their own lives. What they learn here, how to listen, how to empathise, how to treat others with dignity, will determine the kind of men they become and the kind of society they help build.
Balancing the scales and gender equality is not a woman’s issue. It is a societal issue, and therefore, a man’s issue too.
The role of fathers, husbands, and sons
My own commitment to balancing the scales is deeply personal. As a leader, a citizen, and the father of a daughter, my belief in fairness and equity is foundational.
Professionally, I stand where I do because several exceptional women took risks on my behalf, entrusted me with responsibility, and shaped my leadership more profoundly than they may ever know.
My mother’s clear and stoic encouragement created possibilities, and my partner, Janny, whose abilities surpass my own in countless ways, made sacrifices when we were young parents that enabled my career to continue and flourish.
Many of our grandfathers, fathers, students and graduates could tell stories just like this.
Intentional action at Scotch College Perth
In recent years, I have had the privilege of engaging internationally on issues of respect, consent, and modern masculinity, including speaking at the Round Square London conference in 2023 on fostering respectful relationships in boys’ schools.
These conversations affirm what we know to be true:
If society seeks to balance the scales, we must teach boys not only to respect women, but to stand alongside them in building a more just world.
At Scotch, we are commited to ongoing and intentional efforts in influencing a culture that seeks to balance the scales. We:
- embed respectful‑relationships education deeply across our curriculum
- partner meaningfully with external experts
- collaborate with our local girls’ schools including PLC, MLC, St Hilda’s, and others in shaping shared learning
- support and celebrate the remarkable women on our staff who model leadership, courage, and professionalism every day
International Women’s Day offers a moment to pause, but it must also propel us forward.
Balancing the scales requires more than symbolism; it requires sustained commitment, honest reflection, and daily action.
The responsibility we carry to raise young men who value, protect, uplift, and collaborate with women is profound. It is one we embrace wholeheartedly.
Much work remains; but with purpose and integrity, we can empower our boys to become men who help balance the scales, not by shifting power away from others, but by ensuring it is shared fairly, respectfully, and justly.
At Scotch College, gender equality is not a side conversation; it is part of who we are, what we value, and the future in which we are preparing our boys to lead with balance, purpose and respect.
Dr Alec O’Connell
Headmaster
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