Opinion Admire the work, question the power

This separation between achievement and character was not an accident of another era. It was a system — one that quietly decided whose discomfort was expendable in the pursuit of greatness. For much of modern history, we were taught to hold two ideas apart: brilliance and character. A man’s genius — his discoveries, prizes — could be admired independently of how he treated women, colleagues or students. Excellence, we were told, was a shield. This separation was not merely cultural; it was institutional.

Across laboratories, universities, film sets, newsrooms and art studios, women learn this early on. It appears in small, ordinary moments: a warning offered as advice, a complaint quietly discouraged, a reputation described as “brilliant but difficult”.

The message is rarely explicit, but widely understood — speaking up may be principled, but it is rarely without consequence. Silence, by contrast, is often rewarded as professionalism. The reckoning that followed did not invent new transgressions; it illuminated old ones. And in doing so, it forced an uncomfortable question into public life: can achievement absolve moral failure?

The question feels particularly sharp in science. Science claims objectivity, prizes truth and awards medals in the name of merit. Yet many of its most celebrated figures — still revered — held deeply sexist views, excluded women systematically or created hostile environments that pushed women scientists out long before they could produce that would later be called “great work”.

Their Nobel Prizes remain. The women they sidelined often do not. Defenders of the old order return to a familiar argument: judge the work, not the man. But this framing assumes that work emerges in a vacuum.

It does not. Discoveries are shaped by who is allowed into the room, whose ideas are heard and whose labour is credited. When women are interrupted, overlooked or harassed, the science itself changes — what gets asked, funded, published and remembered. To say that sexism is irrelevant to achievement is to misunderstand how achievement is made.

This needs to be said plainly: acknowledging moral failure does not require denying intellectual contribution. Discoveries remain discoveries. Theorems remain true. Scientific advances do not dissolve because the people behind them were flawed. We do not honour science by pretending it was built only by saints. But neither do we honour it by turning brilliance into immunity.The challenge, then, is not whether we remember these figures, but how do we teach their work without inheriting their silences?

This is difficult work. It asks institutions and individuals to hold two truths at once: that someone may have changed the world, and also made it harder for others to belong in it. What we need is not erasure or absolution, but context. Context allows us to honour intellectual contribution without sanctifying its author.  It is not about retroactive judgement but about present responsibility.

Young women entering science today are asking whether  brilliance can be recognised without demanding silence in return. Because the quiet truth is this: the cost of excusing bad behaviour has been paid by those who left, those who endured, those whose careers stalled because someone else’s genius mattered more than their dignity.

History has never suffered from a shortage of genius. What it has suffered from is our inability to hold genius accountable without either worship or denial. And if greatness still requires women to disappear for it to shine, then the problem is not with women or even with the past, but with the standards our institutions continue to uphold in the present.

The author is a chief scientist at CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Views expressed are personal.

National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column