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The financier and peer Dame Helena Morrissey is being seen as a frontrunner for the new provost of Eton College, since Lord Waldegrave of North Hill announced his retirement from the role.

After 583 years, there is “a strong groundswell for appointing a woman as the provost for the first time,” said an old Etonian with close links to the school. I’m not entirely sure what a provost does.

Like Eton, I don’t believe in quotas (all 70 headmasters and 40 provosts in the school’s history have been male) – but in this case, it’s a no-brainer. Give the job to an impressive woman (it might be another 14 years before the next provost vacates), get more great women into senior positions, and why not increase your intake of female teachers while you’re at it?

With the exception of men’s clubs (there isn’t room in these pages to get into this now) I don’t believe there’s a single all-male institution that couldn’t be vastly improved by the presence of women. I feel the same about women-only establishments, by the way. And where children are concerned, I’ll double down.

For the rest of their lives, these boys will be forced to coexist with women at home, socially, and, I’m afraid, in the workplace. We’ve wormed our way into every arena these days. So given Eton has again confirmed its intention to remain a single sex school, it might be helpful to have a scattering of these curious-shaped specimens around during a boy’s formative years.

This would be true for all schoolboys but particularly those at Eton, in my experience. Yes, I know the old Etonian stigma is tiresome, but when you add an inability to interact with women to privilege and what I’d call confidence, rather than the oft-cited ‘entitlement’, it can cause problems in later life.

There’s a certain demographic of old Etonians out there who have trouble looking women in the eye. I’ve sat next to them at dinner parties, waited patiently for them to engage in conversation with the non-male alien to their left or right, marvelled at the fact that they will never ask what I do for a living, and frequently been left saddened by the whole interaction.

Boys’ schools may always breed a degree of awkwardness around the opposite sex, but having impressive female leaders and teachers could help undo some of that damage. It could also prepare young men for the crazy eventuality that they may one day have a female boss.